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RAMBLES AND STUDIES 
IN GREECE 



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RAMBLES AND STUDIES 



IN 



GREECE 



BY 

J. P. MAHAFFY, C.V.O. 

grand commander of the order of the saviour 

author of ' social life in greece, ' a history of greek literature ' 

' greek life and thought from the death of alexander ' 

' the silver age of the greek world ' 

'what have the greeks done for modern civilization?' etc. 

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CONSECRAT AUCTOR 



PREFACE 

This book was first published nearly forty 
years ago. It has since met with many rivals, 
and the country it describes has meantime be- 
come far more accessible and therefore better 
known. Yet it is still alive and still finds 
readers, because the subject of which it treats 
is of undying interest, and the permanent 
features of Greece and the Greeks will com- 
mand human interest wherever men are civilised. 
There are books of travel much older than 
the present which have become part of the 
English gentleman's library. So much is due 
to a great subject. As regards the treatment, 
if any one would take the trouble to compare 
a page of the meritorious Baedeker with a 
corresponding page in this book, he would at 
once see the difference between the pragmatical 
and the sentimental view of the same facts. For 

vii 



viii RAMBLES IN GREECE 

this book is distinctly a sentimental journey, 
omitting much that appeared to the writer 
ephemeral or commonplace, and delaying in 
the contemplation of those things which have 
made Greece of paramount importance to cul- 
tivated Europe. The lapse of years has made 
it necessary to omit here and there a name, or 
even a prophecy which has not been fulfilled, 
but the main body of the book is as true now 
as it was a generation ago, and it has been a 
labour of love to endeavour to make its style 
more worthy of its fascinating subject. From 
this point of view there have been many changes 
made in this new edition offered to the public 
to whom Greece is now accessible in an ordinary 
holiday time. But even to those that stay at 
home, it will serve as a carefully verified report 
of the scenery of a country which occupies so 
large a place in their education. The pictures 
of buildings and statues in the former editions 
have been omitted, because there is now ample 
facility for acquiring photographs of all the 
striking things here described. The main 
desire of the author has been not only to make 
the book better, but also cheaper and more 



PREFACE fe 

portable. If his old and good friends, the 
Greeks, find here some candid criticism, they 
will receive it as the advice of one who has 
spent most of his life in promoting the interest 
of mankind in their fascinating country. The 
Greek public is surely too intelligent to resent 
friendly comment on its failings. And now, 
in the glow of their recent splendid victories, 
when Joannira and Salonica are in their hands, 
they will look with less sensitiveness on the 
criticisms which fearlessly showed them their 
weaknesses, made allowance for their difficul- 
ties, and gave them full credit for their honest 
endeavourSo As I stood in the Parthenon on 
Easter Day in 19 12, and addressed all the 
magnates of the nation and the crowd of 
learned visitors on the occasion of that mem- 
orable feast, I felt in the audience the earnest- 
ness of a new life, the dawn of new hopes. 
They told me that war was imminent, and of 
their confidence in victory which then seemed 
chimerical. At last we may hope that the true 
resurrection of Greece is being accomplished. 

Trinity College, Dublin 
March, 191 3 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. PAGE 

Introduction ....... i 



*5 

34 
53 
78 



I. First Impressions of the Coast 
II. General Impressions of Athens and Attica 

III. Athens — The Museums — The Tombs 

IV. The Acropolis of Athens 
V. Athens — The Theatre of Dionysus — The 

Areopagus 103 

VI. Excursions in Attica — Colonus — The Har- 
bours — Laurium — Sunium .... 128 
VII. Excursions in Attica — Pentelicus — Marathon 

— Daphne — Eleusis 154 

VIII. From Athens to Thebes — The Passes of Parnes 

and of Cith^ron, Eleuther^, Plat^a . 179 
IX. The Plain of Orchomenus, Livadia, Ch^eronea 206 
X. Arachova — Delphi — The Bay of Kirrha . 226 
XI. Elis — Olympia and its Games — The Valley 
of the Alpheus — Mount Erymanthus — 

Patras 249 

xi 



xii RAMBLES IN GREECE ' 

CHAP. PAGE 

XII. Arcadia — Andritzena — Bass^e — Megalopolis — 

Tripolitza 289 

XIII. Corinth — Tiryns — Argos — Nauplia — Hydra — 

^Egina — Epidaurus . . . . . .318 

XIV. Kynuria — Sparta — Messene . . . -358 
XV. Mycenje and Tiryns 374 

XVI. Medieval Greece 401 

INDEX .... ... 433 



INTRODUCTION 

Few men there are who having once visited Greece 
do not contrive to visit it again. And yet when the 
returned traveller meets the ordinary friend who asks 
him where he has been, the next remark is generally, 
1 Dear me ! have you not been there before ? how is it 
you are so fond of going to Greece ? ' There are 
even people who imagine a trip to America far more 
interesting, and who at all events look upon a trip 
to Spain as the same kind of thing — southern climate, 
bad food, dirty inns, and general discomfort, odious to 
bear, though pleasant to describe afterwards in a com- 
fortable English home. 

And yet, excepting perhaps Southern Italy, there is 
no country which can compare with Greece in beauty 
and interest to the intelligent traveller. It is not a 
land for creature comforts, though the climate is 
splendid, and though the hotels in Athens are as 
good as those in most European towns. It is not a 
land for society, though the society at Athens is 
excellent, and far easier of access than that of most 
European capitals. But if a man is fond of the large 
effects of natural scenery, he will find in the Southern 
Alps and fiords of Greece a variety and a richness of 
colour which no other part of Europe affords. If he 
is fond of the details of natural scenery, flowers, 

^ I B 



2 RAMBLES IN GREECE 

shrubs, and trees, he will find the wild-flowers and 
flowering trees of Greece more varied than anything 
he has yet seen. If he desires to study national 
character, and peculiar manners and customs, he will 
find in the sturdv mountaineers of Greece one of the 
most unreformed societies, hardly yet affected by the 
great tide of sameness which is invading all Europe in 
dress, fabrics, and usages. Nevertheless, in spite of 
the folly still talked in England about brigands, he 
will find that without troops, or police, or patrols, or 
any of those melancholy safeguards which are now so 
obtrusive in England and Ireland, life and property 
are as secure as they ever were in our most civilised 
homes. Let him not know a word of history, or of 
art, and he will vet be rewarded by all this natural 
enjoyment ; perhaps also, if he be a politician, he 
may study the unsatisfactory results of a constitution 
made to order, and of a system of free education 
planted in a nation of no political training, but of 
high intelligence. 

Need I add that as to Cicero the whole land was 
one vast shrine of hallowed memories — quocunque 
incedis, historia est — so to the man of culture this 
splendour of associations has only increased with the 
lapse of time and the greater appreciation of human 
perfection. Even were such a land dead to all further 
change, and a mere record in its ruins of the past, I 
know not that any man of reflection could satisfy 
himself with contemplating it. Were he to revisit 
the Parthenon, as it stands, every year of his life, it 
would always be fresh, it would alwavs be astonishing. 
But Greece is a growing country, both in its youth 
and in its age. The development of the nation is 
slowly altering the face of the country, establishing 
very gradually new roads and better communications, 
and making many places accessible which were before 



INTRODUCTION 3 

beyond the reach of brief holiday visits. The in- 
security which haunted the Turkish frontier has been 
pushed back to the north ; new Alps and new mon- 
asteries are brought within the range of Greece. 
But far the greatest results have been achieved in 
recovering the past. Every year there are new 
excavations made, new treasures found, new problems 
in archaeology raised, old ones solved ; and so at every 
fresh visit there is a whole mass of new matter for the 
student who feels that there was already more than 
enough for him to master. 

At Athens alone there is the Schliemann museum 
set up and in order, where the unmatched treasures of 
Mycenae are displayed before his astonished eyes. He 
will find an Egyptian museum of extraordinary merit 
— the gift of a patriotic merchant of Alexandria — in 
which there are two figures — that of a queen, in 
bronze and silver, and that of a slave kneading bread, 
in wood — which alone would make the reputation of 
any collection throughout Europe. In the Parthenon 
museum he will find the famous statuette, copied from 
Phidias's Athene, and the monsters in terra-cotta that 
adorned the pediment of the pre-Persian Parthenon, 
and the archaic statues on which the brightness of the 
colours is not more astonishing than the moulding of 
the figures. 

And these are only some salient features. It is 
indeed plain that were not the new city covering 
the site of the old, discoveries at Athens might be 
made perhaps every year, which would reform and 
enlarge our knowledge of Greek life and history. 

But Athens is rapidly becoming a great and rich 
city. It already numbers 120,000, without counting 
the Peiraeus ; accordingly, except in digging founda- 
tions for new houses, it is not possible to find room 
for any serious excavations. House rent is enormously 



4 RAMBLES IN GREECE 

high, and building is so urgent that the ordinary 
mason receives eight to ten francs per day. This 
rapid increase ought to be followed by an equal 
increase in the wealth of the surrounding country, 
where all the little proprietors ought to turn their 
land into market-gardens. I found that either they 
could not, or (as I was told) they would not, keep 
pace with the increased wants of the city. They are 
content with a little, and allow the city to be supplied 
— badly and at great cost — from Salonica, Syra, Con- 
stantinople, and the islands, while meat comes in tons 
from America. How different is the country round 
Paris and London ! 

But this is a digression into vulgar matters, when 
I had merely intended to inform the reader what 
intellectual novelties he would find under his eyes 
at Athens. For nothing is more slavish in modern 
travel than the inability the student feels, for want 
of time in long journeys, or want of control over his 
conveyance, to stop and examine something which 
strikes him beside his path. And that is the main 
reason why Oriental — and as yet Greek — travelling 
is the best and most instructive of all. 

You can stop your pony or mule, you can turn 
aside from the track which is called your road, you 
are not compelled to catch a train or a steamer at 
a fixed moment. When more roads and rails have 
been brought into Greece, hundreds of people will 
go to see its beauty and its monuments, and will 
congratulate themselves that the country is at last 
accessible. But the real charm will be gone. There 
will be no more riding at dawn through orchards of 
oranges and lemons, with the rich fruit lying on the 
ground, and the nightingales, that will not end their 
exuberant melody, still outsinging from the deep- 
green gloom the sounds of opening day. There will 



INTRODUCTION 5 

be no more watching the glowing east across the 
silver-grey glitter of dewy meadows ; no more 
wandering along grassy slopes, where the scarlet 
anemones, all drenched with the dews of night, are 
striving to raise their drooping heads, and open their 
splendid eyes to meet the rising sun. There will be 
no more watching the serpent and the tortoise, the 
eagle and the vulture, and all the living things whose 
ways and habits animate the sunny solitudes of the 
south. The natives still talk of going to Europe, and 
coming from Europe — justly too, for Greece is still, 
as it always was, part of the East. But the day 
is coming when enlightened politicians, like Mr. 
Venizelos, will insist on introducing, through all 
the remotest glens, the civilisation of Europe, with 
very few of its comforts, but with all its shocking 
ugliness, its stupid hurry, and its slavish uniformity. 

I will conclude with a warning to the archae- 
ologist, and one which applies to all amateurs who 
go to visit excavations, and cannot see what has been 
reported by the actual excavators. As no one is able 
to see what the evidences of digging are, except the 
trained man, who knows not only archaeology, but 
architecture, and who has studied the accumulation 
of soil in various places and forms, so the observer 
who comes to the spot after some years, and expects 
to find all the evidences unchanged, commits a 
blunder of the gravest kind. Dr. Dorpfeld, now the 
highest living authority on such matters, observed 
to me, if you went to Hissarlik expecting to find 
there clearly marked the various strata of successive 
occupations, you would show that you were ignorant 
of the first elements of practical knowledge. For in 
any climate, but especially in these southern lands, 
Nature covers up promptly what has been exposed by 
man ; all sorts of plants spring up along and across 



6 RAMBLES IN GREECE 

the lines which in the fresh cutting were clear and 
precise. In a few years the whole place turns back 
again into a brake, or a grassy slope, and the report of 
the actual diggers remains the only evidence till the 
soil is cut open again in the same way. I saw myself, 
at Olympia, important lines disappearing in this way. 
Dr. Purgold showed me where the line marking the 
embankment of the stadium — it was never surrounded 
with any stone seats — was rapidly becoming effaced, 
and where the plan of the foundations was being 
covered with shrubs and grass. The day for visiting 
and verifying the Trojan excavations is almost gone 
by. That of all the excavations will pass away, if 
they are not carefully kept clear by some permanent 
superintendence ; and to expect this of the Greek 
nation, who know they have endless more treasures 
to find in new places, is more than could reasonably 
be expected. The proper safeguard is to do what 
Dr. Schliemann did, to have with him not only the 
Greek ephoros or superintendent — generally a very 
competent scholar, and sometimes not a very friendly 
witness of foreign triumphs — but also a first-rate 
architect, whose joint observation will correct any 
hastiness or misprision, and so in the mouth of two 
or more witnesses every word will be confirmed. 

In passing on I cannot but remark how strange 
it is that among the many rich men in the world 
who profess an interest in archaeology, not one can 
be found to take up the work as Dr. Schliemann 
did, to enrich science with splendid fields of new 
evidence, and illustrate art, not only with the naive 
efforts of its infancy but with forgotten models of 
perfect and peerless form. 

I will add a word upon the form and scope of the 
following work. My aim is to bring the living 
features of Greece home to the student, by connect- 



INTRODUCTION 7 

ing them, as far as possible, with the facts of older 
history, which are to most of us so familiar. I 
shall also have a good deal to say about the modern 
politics of Greece, and the character of the modern 
population. A long and careful survey of the extant 
literature of ancient Greece has convinced me that the 
pictures usually drawn of the old Greeks are idealised, 
and that the real people were of a very different — if 
you please, of a much lower — type. I may mention, 
as a very remarkable confirmation of my judgment, 
that intelligent people at Athens, who had read my 
opinions elsewhere set forth upon the subject, 1 were 
so much struck with the close resemblance of my 
pictures of the old Greeks to the present inhabitants, 
that they concluded that I must have visited the 
country before writing these opinions, and that I was, 
in fact, drawing my classical people from the life of 
the moderns. If this is not a proof of the justice 
of these views, it is at least a powerful support in 
arguing the matter on the perfectly independent 
ground of the inferences from old literature. After 
all, national characteristics are very hard to shake off, 
and it would be strange indeed, if both these and the 
Greek language should have remained almost intact, 
and yet the race have either changed, or been 
saturated with foreign blood. Foreign invasions and 
foreign conquests of Greece were common enough ; 
out here, as elsewhere, the climate and circumstances 
which have formed a race seem to conspire to preserve 
it, and to absorb foreign types and features, rather than 
to permit the extinction or total change of the 
original people. 

I felt fortified in my judgment of Greek 
character by finding that a very smart, though too 
sarcastic, observer, E. About, in his well-known 

1 In my Social Life in Greece, from Homer to Menander, 



8 RAMBLES IN GREECE 

Greet :;>:-. tmporaine^ estimated the people somewhat as 

I am disposed to estimate the common people oi 
ancient Greece. He noticed, in the second and 

succeeding chapters of his book, a series of fearer-, f 
which make this nationality a very distinct one in 
jpe. Starting from the question of national 
beauty, and holding rightly that the beauty of the 
men is greater than that of the women, he touches on 
a point which toid verv deeply upon ah the history 
of Greek art. At the present day, Greek men are 
much more particular about their appearance, and 
more vain of it, than their women. The most 
striking beauty among them is that of young men \ 
and as to the care of figure, as About well observes, 
in Greece it is the men who pinch their waists — a 
fashion unknown among Greek women. A.:nc 
this handsome appearance, the people are, without 
doubt, a verv temperate people ; although thev make 
a great deal of strong wine, thev seldom drink much, 
and are far more critical about good water than wine. 
Indeed, in so warm a climate, wine is disagreeable 
even to the northern traveller j and, as Herodotus 
remarked long ago, very likelv to produce insanity, 
the rarest form of disease among the Greeks, In 
fact, they are not a passionate race — having at all ares 
been gifted with a very bright intellect, and a great 
reasonableness : thev have an intellectual insight into 
things, which is inconsistent with the storms of wilder 
passion. 

Thev are, probably, as clever a people as can be 
round in the world, and fit for any mental work 
whatever. This they have proved, not only by getting 
into their hands all the trade of the Eastern Medi- 
terranean, but bv holding their own among English 
merchants in England. As vet they have not found 
anv encouragement in other directions : but if settled 



INTRODUCTION 9 

among a great people, and weaned from the follies 
and jealousies of Greek politics, they would (like the 
Jews) outrun many of us, both in politics and in 
science. However that may be — and perhaps such 
a development requires moral qualities in which they 
seem deficient — it is certain that their workmen learn 
trades with extraordinary quickness j while their 
young commercial or professional men acquire 
languages, and the amount of knowledge necessary 
for making money, with the most singular aptness. 
But as yet they are stimulated chiefly by the love 
of gain. 

Besides this, they have great national pride, and, 
as About remarks, we need never despair of a people 
who are at the same time intelligent and proud. 
They are very fond of displaying their knowledge on 
all points — I noted especially their pride in exhibiting 
their acquaintance with old Greek history and legend. 
When I asked them whether they believed the old 
mythical stories which they repeated, they seemed 
afraid of being thought simple if they confessed that 
they did, and of injuring the reputation of their 
ancestors if they declared they did not. So they used 
to preserve a discreet neutrality. 

I will add that if the Greeks as a nation have not 
realised the aspirations which they, and which most 
phil-Hellenes, expressed very confidently in the last 
century, it seems to me due to two national defects, 
which are possibly but one under different aspects. 
The first is the lack of wit and humour, which seems 
to have deserted the nation long ago, and which is 
a very great psychological defect. Nothing is more 
curious to the student of Greek Literature than the 
disappearance of that precious spice and condiment 
of life in the Hellenistic age. Aristophanes had 
evidently lost all interest for them. Among the 



io RAMBLES IN GREECE 

thousands of fragments we have found on papyrus I 
cannot remember that there is one from that supreme 
wit. 1 

There is no greater protection from absurdities, 
from social mistakes, from political blunders, than 
a sense of humour. Allied with this, and as I have 
just said, possibly another phase of the same fault, is 
that want of political perspective which characterises 
the modern Greek. A very few years ago, there was 
an excitement which caused the fall of a Minister, 
and I think even of a Ministry, because a new trans- 
lation of the Gospels, or the LXX. (it does not 
matter which), was undertaken. It was imagined 
to be a disguised inroad of Russian influence, and 
as such was resisted with public demonstrations and 
with riots. Thus at the present moment (1907) the 
whole of Greek society is excited over the possibilities 
of adding Macedonia to their kingdom, when the 
Turks shall have been driven out^ and hence there is 
a stream of Greek publications intended to show that 
the rival Bulgarian aspirations are those of violent 
and fraudulent neighbours. It were well indeed, if 
the Greeks would turn back to their neglected 
Aristophanes, and study the lessons of his famous 
Birds. If ever the time of annexing Macedonia 
comes, the claimant who will secure the favour of the 
European powers is the neighbour whose internal 
progress towards higher civilisation has been the most 
continuous and the most marked. The want of 
political perspective has hitherto prevented the nation 
and its leaders from recognising the vital importance 
of this obvious consideration. 

1 We have, indeed, the Mimes of Herondas, the plot of a comedy of 

Cratinus, or most of it, recovered, but that may have been a mere piece 
of literary history, and a literature of very low farce, indicated by 
a parody on the Iphigenia in Tauris. 



INTRODUCTION n 

The instinct of liberty appears to me as strong in 
the nation now as it ever was. In fact, the people 
have never been really enslaved. The eternal refuge 
for liberty afforded by the sea and the mountains has 
saved them from this fate ; and, even beneath the 
heavy yoke of the Turks, a large part of the nation 
was not subdued, but, in the guise of bandits and 
pirates, enjoyed the great privilege for which their 
ancestors had contended so earnestly. The Mainotes, 
for example, occupying the coasts of Messene, never 
tolerated any resident Turkish magistrate among 
them, but c handed to a trembling tax-collector a little 
purse of gold pieces, hung on the end of a naked 
sword.' 1 Now, the whole nation is more intensely 
and thoroughly democratic than any other in Europe. 
They acknowledge no nobility save that of descent 
from the chiefs who fought in the war of liberation ; 
they will allow no distinction of classes -, every 
common mule-boy is a gentleman (kt^ios), and fully 
your equal. He sits in the room at meals, and joins 
in the conversation at dinner. They only tolerate 
a king because they cannot endure one of themselves 
as their superior. This jealousy is, unfortunately, 
a mainspring of Greek politics, and when combined 
with a dislike of agriculture, as a stupid and un- 
intellectual occupation, fills all the country with 
politicians, merchants, and journalists. Moreover, 
they wholly lack the spirit of subordination sometimes 
attained by their great ancestors, and are often 
accused of lack of honesty — a very grave feature, and 
the greatest obstacle to progress in all ages. It is 
better, however, to let points of character come out 
gradually in the course of our studies than to bring 
them together into an official portrait. It is im- 
possible to wander through the country without seeing 

1 The words are M. About's. 



12 RAMBLES IN GREECE 

and understanding the inhabitants j for the traveller is 
in constant contact with them, and they have no 
scruple in displaying all their character. 

M. About has earned the profound hatred of the 
nation by his picture, and I do not wonder at it, 
seeing that the tone in which he writes is flippant and 
ill-natured, and seems to betoken certain private 
animosities, of which the Greeks tell numerous 
anecdotes. 

I have no such excuse for being severe or ill- 
natured, as I found nothing but kindness and hospi- 
tality everywhere, and sincerely hope that my free 
judgments may not hurt any sensitive Greek who may 
chance to see them. But even the great Finlay — one 
of their best friends — is constantly censured by them 
for his writings about Modern Greece. 

Yet any real lover of Greece must feel that plain 
speaking about the faults of the nation is much 
wanted. The worship lavished upon them by Byron 
and his school has done its good, and can now only do 
harm. On the other hand, I must confess that a 
longer and more intimate intercourse with the Greeks 
of the interior and of the mountains leads a fair 
observer to change his earlier estimate, and think more 
highly of the nation than at first acquaintance. Un- 
fortunately, the Greeks known to most of us are 
sailors — mongrels from the ports of the Levant, 
having very little in common with the bold, honest, 
independent peasant who lives under his vine and his 
fig-tree in the valleys of Arcadia or of Phocis. It 
was, no doubt, an intimate knowledge of the sound 
core of the nation which inspired Byron with that 
enthusiasm which many now think extravagant and 
misplaced. But here, as elsewhere, the folly of a 
great genius has more truth in it than the wisdom of 
his feebler critics. 



INTRODUCTION 13 

A fresh visit to the wilder parts in 1905 produced 
in me a feeling of disappointment that more had not 
been done for the inner civilisation of the country. 
The villages were just as dirty and unsanitary as 
ever ; the streets even of important country towns 
wholly neglected, and hardly passable for vehicles, and 
the discomforts of Greek travel hardly mitigated by 
paying forty francs a day to a dragoman, instead of ten 
or twelve for nearly the same discomforts. There are 
now more railways ; there are some good roads ; but 
everywhere the natives have learned to increase their 
prices without improving what they have to sell, and 
so they will deter many from visiting, still more from 
revisiting, places where small extortions produce large 
annoyance. The traveller is still regarded as a 
personage who will never return, and so must be 
fleeced now or never. The policy of inducing people 
to visit and revisit modest, clean, well-kept summer 
resorts has not dawned, so far as I know, upon the 
Greeks, and yet there are few countries in Europe 
with such natural advantages for this purpose. Athens 
no doubt has been improved into a modern European 
capital, with all its comforts. But living at Athens 
has increased in cost out of all due proportion. This 
again is the want of perspective already noticed. 
The same Greek who is far too long-sighted on the 
Macedonian question, is short-sighted regarding the 
future of his own capital. As soon as Athens gets the 
reputation of being a dear city, idle travellers (and they 
are the great majority) will not undertake a long 
journey to see it. 

But there is always good hope for a people so 
intellectual as the Greeks. It may turn out with the 
nation, as it turned out with the Historical Congress 
at Athens in 1905. A few days before its opening, 
everything seemed to be, and was, in confusion. 



14 RAMBLES IN GREECE 

There were local jealousies, contradictory orders, 
absurd remissness — all seemed to herald a complete 
failure. Yet, as if by some natural magic, all these 
clouds and tempests vanished, and the first International 
meeting was a brilliant and complete success. 



CHAPTER I 

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE COAST 

A voyage to Greece does not at first sight seem a 
great undertaking. We all go to and fro to Italy as 
we used to go to France. A trip to Rome, or even 
to Naples, is now an Easter holiday affair. And is 
not Greece very close to Italy on the map ? What 
signifies the narrow sea that divides them ? This is 
what a man might say who only considered geography, 
and did not regard the teaching of history. For the 
student of history cannot look upon these two penin- 
sulas without being struck with the fact that they are, 
historically speaking, turned back to back ; that while 
the face of Italy is turned westward, and looks towards 
France and Spain, and across to us, the face of Greece 
looks eastward, towards Asia Minor and towards 
Egypt. Every great city in Italy, except Venice, 
approaches or borders the Western Sea — Genoa, Pisa, 
Florence, Rome, Naples. All the older history of 
Rome, its development, its glories, lie on the west of 
the Apennines. When you cross them you come to 
what is called the back of Italy ; and you feel that in 
that flat country, and that straight coast-line, you are 
separated from its true beauty and charm. 1 Contrari- 

1 Though this statement is broadly true, it requires some modifica- 
tion. I should be sorry to be thought insensible to the beauties, not 
only of Ravenna, with its mosaics and its pines, but of Ancona, of the 

15 



16 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

wise, in Greece, the whole weight and dignity of its 
history gravitate towards the eastern coast. All its 
great cities — Athens, Thebes, Corinth, Argos, Sparta 
— are on that side. Their nearest neighbours were 
the coast cities of Asia Minor and of the Cyclades, 
while the western coasts long remained to them 
harbourless and strange. If you pass Cape Malea, 
they said, then forget your home. 

So it happens that those coasts of Italy and Greece, 
which look so close together, are outlying and out-of- 
the-way parts of the countries to which they belong ; 
and if you want to go straight from real Italy to real 
Greece, the longest way is that from Brindisi to 
Corfu, for you must still journey across Italy to 
Brindisi, and from Corfu to Athens. The shortest 
way is to take ship at Naples, and to be carried round 
Italy and round Greece, from the centres of culture on 
the west of Italy to the centres of culture (such as 
they are) on the east of Greece. But this is no 
trifling passage. When the ship has left the coasts 
of Calabria, and steers into the open sea, you feel that 
you have at last left the west of Europe, and are set- 
ting sail for the Eastern Seas. You are, moreover, in 
an open sea — the furious Adriatic — in which I have 
seen storms which would be creditable to the Atlantic 
Ocean, and which at times forbid even steam navi- 
gation. 

I may anticipate for a moment here, and say that 
even now the face of Athens is turned, as of old, to 
the East. Her trade and her communications are 
through the Levant. Her chief intercourse is with 
Constantinople, and Smyrna, and Syra, and Alex- 
andria. 

This curious parallel between ancient and modern 

Monte Gargano, of Trani and Bari, of Otranto and Taranto, and of the 
rich gardens and vineyards of Apulia. 



I FIRST IMPRESSIONS i) 

geographical attitudes in Greece is, no doubt, greatly 
due to the now bygone Turkish rule. In addition 
to other contrasts, Mohammedan rule and Eastern 
jealousy — long unknown in Western Europe — first 
jarred upon the traveller when he touched the coasts 
of Greece ; and this dependency was once really part 
of a great Asiatic Empire, where all the interests and 
communications gravitated eastward, and away from 
the Christian and better-civilised West. The revolu- 
tion which expelled the Turks was unable to root out 
the ideas which their subjects had learned ; and so, in 
spite of Greek hatred of the Turk, his influence still 
lives through Greece in a thousand ways. 

For many hours after the coasts of Calabria had 
faded into the night, and even after the snowy dome 
of Etna was lost to view, our ship steamed through 
the open sea, with no land in sight ; but we were told 
that early in the morning, at the very break of dawn, 
the coasts of Greece would be visible. So, while 
others slept, I started up at half-past three, eager to 
get the earliest possible sight of the land which still 
occupies so large a place in our thoughts. It was a 
soft grey morning ; the sky was covered with light, 
broken clouds, the deck was wet with a passing 
shower, of which the last drops were still flying in 
the air ; and before us, some ten miles away, the 
coasts and promontories of the Peloponnesus were 
reaching southward into the quiet sea. These long 
serrated ridges did not look lofty, in spite of their 
snow-clad peaks, nor did they look inhospitable, in 
spite of" their rough outline, but were all toned in 
harmonious colour — a deep purple blue, with here and 
there, on the far Arcadian peaks, and on the ridge of 
Mount Taygetus, patches of pure snow. In contrast 
to the large sweeps of the Italian coast, its open seas, 

c 



18 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

its long waves of mountain, all was here broken, and 
rugged, and varied. The sea was studded with rocky 
islands, and the land indented with deep, narrow 
bays. I can never forget the strong and peculiar 
impression of that first sight of Greece; nor can I 
cease to wonder at the strange likeness which rose in 
my mind, and which made me think of the bays and 
rocky coasts of the west and south-west of Ireland. 
There was the same cloudy, showery sky, which is so 
common there ; there was the same serrated outline 
of hills, the same richness in promontories, and rocky 
islands, and land-locked bays. Nowhere have I seen 
a like purple colour, except in the wilds of Kerry and 
Connemara j and though the general height of the 
Greek mountains, as the snow in May testified, was 
far greater than that of the Irish hills, yet on that 
morning, and in that light, they looked low and 
homely, not displaying their grandeur, or command- 
ing awe and wonder, but rather attracting the sight 
by their wonderful grace, and by their variety and 
richness of outline and of colour. 

I stood there, I know not how long — without 
guide or map — telling myself the name of each moun- 
tain and promontory, and so filling out the idle 
descriptions and outlines of many books with the fresh 
reality itself. There was the west coast of Elis, as far 
north as the eye could reach — the least interesting 
part of the view, as it was of the history, of Greece ; 
then the richer and more varied outline of Messene, 
with its bay, thrice famous at great intervals, and yet 
for long ages feeding idly on that fame ; Pylos, Sphac- 
teria, Navarino — each a foremost name in Hellenic 
history. Above the bay could be seen those rich 
slopes which the Spartans coveted of old, and which, 
as I saw them, were covered with golden corn. The 
three headlands which give to the Peloponnesus * its 



i FIRST IMPRESSIONS 19 

plane-leaf form,' * were as yet lying parallel before us, 
and their outline confused ; but the great crowd of 
heights and intersecting chains, which told at once 
the Alpine character of the peninsula, called to mind 
the other remark of the geographer, in which he calls 
it the Acropolis of Greece. The words of old Herod- 
otus, too, rise in the mind with new reality, when he 
talks of the poor and stony soil of the country as a 
c rugged nurse of liberty.' 

For the nearer the ship approaches, the more this 
feature comes out 5 increased, no doubt, greatly in 
later days by depopulation and general decay, when 
many arable tracts have lain desolate, but still at all 
times necessary, when a large proportion of the 
country consists of rocky peaks and precipices, where 
a goat may graze, but where the eagle builds secure 
from the hand of man. The coast, once teeming 
with traffic, is now lonely and deserted. A single 
sail in the large gulf of Koron, and a few miserable 
huts, discernible with a telescope, only added to the 
feeling of solitude. It was, indeed, c Greece, but 
living Greece no more.' Even the pirates, who 
sheltered in these creeks and mountains, have aban- 
doned this region, in which there is nothing now to 
plunder. 2 

But as we crossed the mouth of the gulf, the eye 
fastened with delight on distant white houses along 
the high ground of the eastern side — in other words, 

1 Cf. Strabo, viii. c. 2, Han toLvvv 7) IleXoTrdvvrjaos ioiKvla <p6\Xi}. 
irXardvov rb <rx^/xa. 

2 These words were written in 1873. On a later occasion, our ship 
was obliged to run into this bay for shelter from a storm, when we 
found some cultivation along the coasts, and a village (Koron), with 
extensive fortifications above it, said to be Venetian. The aspect was 
by no means so desolate as appeared from a passing view outside the 
headlands. Coasting steamers now call here (at Kalamata) every second 
day. 



20 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

along the mountain slopes which run out into the 
promontory of Tainaron ; and a telescope soon 
brought them into distinctness, and gave us the first 
opportunity of discussing modern Greek life. We 
stood off the coast of Maina — the home of those 
Mainotes whom Byron has made so famous as pirates, 
as heroes, as lovers, as murderers ; and even now, 
when the stirring days of war and of piracy have 
passed away, the whole district retains the aspect of a 
country in a state of siege or of perpetual danger. 
Instead of villages surrounded by peaceful homesteads, 
each Mainote house, though standing alone, was 
walled in, and in the centre was a high square tower, 
in which, according to trustworthy travellers, the 
Mainote men used to spend their day watching their 
enemies, while only the women and children ventured 
out to till the fields. For these fierce mountaineers 
were not only perpetually defying the Turkish power, 
which was never able to subdue them thoroughly, but 
they were all engaged at home with internecine feuds, of 
which the origin was often forgotten, but of which the 
consequences remained in the form of vengeance due for 
the life of a kinsman. When this was exacted on one 
side, the obligation changed to the other ; and so for 
generation after generation they spent their lives in 
either seeking or avoiding vengeance. This more 
than Corsican vendetta 1 was, by a sort of mediaeval 
chivalry, prohibited to the women and children, who 
were thus in perfect safety, while their husbands and 
fathers were in daily and deadly danger. 

The Mainotes are considered the purest in blood of 
all the Greeks, though it does not appear that their 
dialect approaches old Greek nearer than those of their 
neighbours ; but for beauty of person, and independ- 

1 Which the reader will find best portrayed in Prosper M6rimeVi 

Colomba, 



i FIRST IMPRESSIONS 21 

ence of spirit, they rank first among the inhabitants 
of the Peloponnesus, and most certainly they must 
have among them a good deal of the old Messenian 
blood. Most of the country is barren, but there are 
orange woods, which yield the most delicious fruit — 
a fruit so large and rich that it makes other oranges 
appear small and tasteless. The country is perfectly 
safe for visitors, and the people extremely hospitable, 
though the diet is not very palatable to the northern 
traveller. 

So with talk and anecdote about the Mainotes — for 
every one was now up on deck and sight-seeing — we 
neared the classic headland of Tainaron, almost the 
southern point of Europe, once the site of a great 
temple of Poseidon — not preserved to us, like its sister 
monument on Sunium — and once, too, the entry to 
the regions of the dead. And, as if to remind us of 
its most beautiful legend, the dolphins, which had 
befriended Arion of old, and carried him here to land, 
rose in the calm summer sea, and came playing round 
the ship, showing their quaint forms above the water, 
and keeping with our course, as it were an escort into 
the homely seas and islands of truer Greece. Strangely 
enough, in many other journeys through Greek waters, 
twice again only did we see these dolphins ; and here 
as elsewhere, the old legend, I suppose, based itself 
upon the fact that this, of all their wide domain, was 
the favourite resort of these creatures, with which the 
poets of old felt so strong a sympathy. 

But, while the dolphins have been occupying our 
attention, we have cleared Cape Matapan, and the 
deep Gulf of Asine and Gythium — in fact, the Gulf 
of Sparta is open to our view. We strained our eyes 
to discover the features of 'hollow Lacedasmon,' and 
to take in all the outline of this famous bay, through 
which so many Spartans had held their course in the 



22 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap, 

days of their greatness. The site of Sparta is far from 
the sea, probably twelve or fifteen miles, but the place 
is marked for every spectator, throughout all the 
Peloponnesus and its coasts, by the jagged top of 
Mount Taygetus, even in June covered with snow. 
Through the forests upon its slopes the young Spartans 
would hunt all day with their famous Laconian hounds, 
and after a rude supper beguile the evening with stories 
of their dangers and their success. But, as might be 
expected, of the five villages which made up the 
famous city, few vestiges remain. The old port of 
Gythium is still a port ; but here, too, the c wet ways,' 
and that sea once covered with boats, which a Greek 
comic poet has called the c ants of the sea,' have been 
deserted. 

We were a motley company on board — Russians, 
Greeks, Turks, French, English ; and it was not hard 
to find pleasant companions and diverting conversation 
among them all. I turned to a Turkish gentleman, 
who spoke French indifferently. 'Is it not,' said I, 
c a great pity to see this fair coast so desolate ? ' c A 
great pity, indeed,' said he, c but what can you expect 
from these Greeks ? They are all pirates and robbers; 
they are all liars and knaves. Had the Turks been 
allowed to hold possession of the country they would 
have improved it, and developed its resources ; but 
since the Greeks became independent, everything has 
gone to ruin. Roads are broken up, 1 communications 
abandoned ; the people emigrate and disappear — in fact, 
nothing prospers.' 

Presently, I got beside a Greek gentleman, from 
whom I was anxiously picking up the first necessary 
phrases and politenesses of modern Greek, and, by way 
of amusement, put to him the same question. I got 

1 This is not wholly false, for the remains of Turkish riding roads are 
often found in patches through now wild country. 



i FIRST IMPRESSIONS 23 

the answer I expected. 'Ah !' said he, 'the Turks., 
the Turks ! When I think how these miscreants 
have ruined our beautiful country ! How could a 
land thrive or prosper under such odious tyranny ? ' 
I ventured to suggest that the Turks were now gone 
five-and-forty years, and that it was high time to see 
the fruits of recovered liberty in the Greeks. No, it 
was still too soon. The Turks had cut down all the 
woods, and so ruined the climate ; they had destroyed 
the cities, broken up the roads, encouraged the bandits 
— in fact, they had left the country in such a state that 
centuries would not cure it. 

The verdict of Europe was then (1873) ^ n ^ avour 
of the Greek gentleman ; but it might have been 
suggested, had we been so disposed, that the greatest 
and the most hopeless of all these sorrows — the utter 
depopulation of the country — is not due to either 
modern Greeks or Turks, nor even to the Slav hordes 
of the Middle Ages. It was a calamity which came 
upon Greece almost suddenly, immediately after the 
loss of her independence, and which historians and 
physiologists have as yet been only partially able to 
explain. 1 Of this very coast upon which we were 
then gazing, the geographer Strabo, about the time of 
Christ, says, 'that of old, Lacedaemon had numbered 
100 cities ; in his day there were but ten remaining.' 
So, then, the sum of the crimes of both Greeks and 
Turks may be diminished by one. But I, perceiving 
that each of them would have been extremely indignant 
at this historical palliation of the other's guilt, c kept 
silence, even from good words.' 

These dialogues beguiled us till we found ourselves, 
almost suddenly, facing the promontory of Malea, with 

1 See the remarks of Polybius, who was himself witness of this great 
change, quoted in the last chapter of my Greek Life and Thought, from 
Alexander to the Roman Conquest. 



24 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

the island of Cythera (Cerigo) on our right. The 
island is little celebrated in history. The Phoenicians 
seem, in very old times, to have had a settlement there 
for the working of their purple-shell fishery, for which 
the coasts of Laconia were celebrated ; and they doubt- 
less founded there the worship of the Sidonian goddess, 
who was transformed by the Greeks into Aphrodite 
(Venus). During the Peloponnesian War we hear of 
the Athenians using it as a station for their fleet, when 
they were ravaging the adjacent coasts. It was, in 
fact, used by their naval power as the same sort of 
blister (e7riTetx«ris) on Sparta that Dekelea was when 
occupied by the Spartans in Attica. 

Cape Malea is more famous. 1 It was in olden days 
the limit of the homely Greek waters, the bar to all 
fair weather and regular winds — a place of storms and 
wrecks, and the portal to an inhospitable open sea ; 
and we can well imagine the delight of the adventurous 
trader who had dared to cross the Western Seas, to 
gather silver and lead in the mines of Spain, when he 
rounded the dreaded Cape, homeward bound in his 
heavy-laden ship, and looked back from the quiet 
iEgean. The barren and rocky Cape has its new 
feature now. On the very extremity there is a little 
platform, at some elevation over the water, and only 
accessible with great difficulty from the land by a steep 
goat-path. Here a hermit built himself a tiny hut, 
cultivated his little plot of corn, and lived out in the 
lone seas, with no society but stray passing ships. 2 
When Greece was thickly peopled he might well have 
been compelled to seek loneliness here ; but now, when 

1 The statues picked up in the sea outside Malea and inside Cerigo, 
from an ancient wreck, have lately added interest to the spot. These 
statues are now in the Museum at Athens. 

2 We hailed him with a steam whistle in 1886, in vain j so it may be 
that he has passed to some newer and more social kind of life. 



i FIRST IMPRESSIONS 25 

in almost any mountain chain he could find solitude 
and desolation enough, it seems as if that poetic instinct 
that so often guides the ignorant and unconscious 
anchorite had sent him to this spot, which combines, 
in a strange way, solitude and publicity, and which 
excites the curiosity, but forbids the intrusion, of every 
careless passenger to the East. 

So we passed into the iEgean, the real thoroughfare 
of the Greeks, the mainstay of their communication— 
a sea, and yet not a sea, but the frame of countless 
headlands and islands, which are ever in view to give 
confidence to the sailor in the smallest boat. The 
most striking feature in our view was the serrated 
outline of the mountains of Crete, far away to the S.E. 
Though the day was grey and cloudy, the atmosphere 
was perfectly clear, and allowed us to see these very 
distant Alps, on which the snow still lay in great fields. 
The chain of Ida brought back to us the old legends 
of Minos and his island kingdom, nor could any 
safer seat of empire be imagined for a power coming 
from the south than this great long bar of mountains, 
to which half the islands of the iEgean could pass a 
fire signal in times of war or piracy. 1 The legends 
preserved to us of Minos — the human sacrifices to the 
Minotaur — the hostility to Theseus — the identification 
of Ariadne with the legends of Bacchus, so Eastern 
and orgiastic in character — make us feel, with a sort 
of instinctive certainty, that the power of Minos was 
no Hellenic empire, but one of Asiatics, from which 
they commanded distant coasts and islands, for the 
purposes of trade. Phoenicians settled, as we know, 

1 A closer view of Crete disclosed to me the interesting fact that the 
island is turned to the north, as regards its history. It is barred on the 
south by great walls of rock, with hardly any landing-places, so that all 
traffic and culture must have started from the slopes and bays on the 
north side, where the Cyclades are its neighbours. 



26 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

at Corinth, at Thebes, and probably at Athens, in the 
days of their greatness, but they seem always to have 
been strangers and sojourners there, while in Crete 
they kept the stronghold of their power. Thucydides 
thinks that Minos's main object was to put down 
piracy and protect commerce ; and this is probably the 
case, though we are without evidence on the point. 
The historian evidently regards this old Cretan empire 
as the older model of the Athenian, but settled in a far 
more advantageous place, and not liable to the dangers 
which proved the ruin of Athens. 

The nearer islands were small, and of no reputation, 
but each like a mountain top reaching out of a sub- 
merged valley, stony and bare. Melos was farther off, 
but quite distinct — the old scene of Athenian violence 
and cruelty, to Thucydides so impressive, that he 
dramatises the incidents, and passes from cold narrative 
and set oration to a dialogue between the oppressors 
and the oppressed. Melian starvation was long pro- 
verbial among the Greeks, and there the fashionable 
and aristocratic Alcibiades applied the arguments and 
carried out the very policy which the tanner Cleon 
could not propose without being pilloried by the great 
historian whom he made his foe. This and other 
islands, which were always looked upon by the main- 
land Greeks with some contempt, have of late days 
received special attention from archaeologists. It is 
said that the present remains of the old Greek type 
are now to be found among the islanders — an observa- 
tion which I found fully justified by a short sojourn at 
iEgina, where the very types of the Parthenon frieze 
can be found among the inhabitants, if the traveller 
will look for them diligently. One of the noblest and 
most perfect types of Greek beauty has, indeed, come 
to us from Melos, but not in real life. It is the 
celebrated Venus of Melos — the most pure and perfect 



r FIRST IMPRESSIONS 27 

image we know of that goddess, and one which puts 
to shame the lower ideals so much admired in the 
museums of Italy. 1 

Another remark should be made in justice to the 
islands, that the groups of Therasia and Santorin, 
which lie round the crater of a great active volcano, 
have supplied us not only with the oldest forms of the 
Greek alphabet in their inscriptions, but with far the 
oldest vestiges of inhabitants in any part of Greece. 
In these, beneath the lava slopes formed by a great 
eruption — an eruption earlier than any history, except, 
perhaps, Egyptian — have been found the dwellings, 
the implements, and the bones of men who cannot 
have lived there much later than 2000 B.C. The arts, 
as well as the implements, of these old dwellers in 
their Stone Age, have shown us how very ancient 
Greek forms, and even Greek decorations, are in the 
world's history : and we may yet from them and from 
further researches, such as Schliemann's, be able to 
reconstruct the state of things in Greece before the 
Greeks came from their Eastern homes. The special 
reason why these inquiries seem to me likely to lead 
to good result is this, that what is called neo-barbarism 
is less likely to mislead us here than elsewhere. Neo- 
barbarism means the occurrence in later times of the 
manners and customs which generally mark very old 
and primitive times. Some few things of this kind 
survive everywhere ; thus, in the Irish Islands of 
Arran, a group of famous savants mistook a stone 
donkey-shed of two years' standing for the building of 
an extinct race in grey antiquity : as a matter of fact, 
the construction had not changed from the oldest type. 
But the spread of culture, and the fulness of population 
in the good days of Greece, make it certain that every 
spot about the thoroughfares was improved and civilised ; 

1 She is now in the Louvre. 



28 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

and so, as I have said, there is less chance here thar 
anywhere of our being deceived into mistaking rude- 
ness for oldness, and raising a modern savage to the 
dignity of a primaeval man. 

But we must not allow speculations to spoil our 
observations, nor waste the precious moments given us 
to take in once for all the general outline of the Greek 
coasts. While the long string of islands, from Melos 
up to the point of Attica, framed in our view to the 
right, to the left the great bay of Argolis opened far 
into the land, making a sort of vista into the Pelopon- 
nesus, so that the mountains of Arcadia could be seen 
far to the west standing out against the setting sun ; 
for the day was now clearer — the clouds began to 
break, and let us feel touches of the sun's heat towards 
evening. As we passed Hydra, the night began to 
close about us, and we were obliged to make out the 
rest of our geography with the aid of a rich full 
moon. 

But these Attic waters, if I may so call them, will 
be mentioned again and again in the course of our 
voyage, and need not now be described in detail. The 
reader will, I think, get the clearest notion of the size 
of Greece by reflecting upon the time required to sail 
round the Peloponnesus in a good steamer. The ship 
in which we made the journey steamed about ten miles 
an hour. Coming within close range of the coast ot 
Messene, about five o'clock in the morning, we 
rounded all the headlands, and arrived at the Peirasus 
about eleven o'clock the same night. So, then, the 
Peloponnesus is a small peninsula, but even to an out- 
side view c very large for its size ' ; for the actual 
climbing up and down of constant mountains, in any 
land journey from place to place, makes the distance in 
miles very much greater than the line as the crow 
flies. If I said that every ordinary distance, as 



i FIRST IMPRESSIONS 29 

measured on the map, is doubled in the journey, I 
believe I should be under the mark. 

But now most travellers will choose the other route 
into Greece, that by Brindisi and the Ionian Islands. 
It is fully as picturesque, in some respects more so, for 
there is no more beautiful bay than the long fiord 
leading up to Corinth, which passes Patras, iEgium, 
Missolonghi, and Itea, the port of Delphi. The 
Akrokeraunian mountains, which are the first point 
of the Albanian coast seen by the traveller who stops 
at the wild Santi Quaranta, the port for Jannina, are 
also very striking, and no one can forget the charms 
and beauties of Corfu. I think a market-day in Corfu, 
with those royal - looking peasant lads, who come 
clothed in sheepskins from the coast, and spend their 
day handling knives and revolvers with peculiar in- 
terest at the stalls, is among the most picturesque 
sights in Europe. The lofty mountains of Ithaca and 
its greater sisters, and then the rich belt of verdure 
along the east side of Zante — all these features make 
this journey one of surpassing beauty and interest. 
Yet notwithstanding all these advantages, there is not 
the same excitement in first approaching semi-Greek 
or outlying Greek settlements, and only gradually 
arriving at the real centres of historic interest. Such 
at least was the feeling (shared by other observers) 
which I had in approaching Greece by this more 
varied route. No traveller, however, is likely to miss 
either, as it is obviously best to enter by one route 
and depart by the other, in a voyage not intended to 
reach beyond Greece. But from what I have said, it 
may be seen that I prefer to enter by the direct route 
from Naples, and to leave by the Gulf of Corinth and 
the Ionian Islands. I trust that ere long arrangements 
may be made for permitting travellers who cross the 
isthmus to make an excursion on the way to the 



30 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Akrokorinthus — the great citadel of Corinth — which 
they are now compelled to hurry past in the train. 

The modern Patras, still a thriving port, is now 
the main point of contact between Greece and the 
rest of Europe. For, as a railway has now been 
opened from Patras to Athens, all the steamers from 
Brindisi, Venice, and Trieste, put in there, and from 
thence the stream of travellers proceeds by the new 
line to the capital. The old plan of steaming up the 
long fiord to Corinth is abandoned. Not that there is 
no longer confusion. The railway station at Patras, 
and that at Athens, are the most curious bear-gardens 
in which business ever was done. The traveller (I 
speak of the year of our Lord 1889) used to be in- 
formed that unless he was there an hour before the time 
he would not get his luggage weighed and despatched. 
It is nearly as bad now, for when he comes down from 
his comfortable hotel to find out what it all means, he 
finds the whole population of the town in possession 
of the station. Everybody who has nothing to do 
gets in the way of those who have - f everything is full 
of noise and confusion. 

At last the train steams out of the station, and 
takes its deliberate way along the coast, through lovely 
woods of fir-trees, bushes of arbutus and mastic, and 
the many flowers which stud the earth. And here 
already the traveller, looking out of the window, can 
form an idea of the delights of real Greek travel, by 
which he must understand mounting a mule or pony, 
and making his way along woody paths, or beside the 
quiet sea, or up the steep ascent of a rocky defile. 
Every half-hour the train crosses torrents coming from 
the mountains, which in flood times colour the sea for 
some distance with the brilliant brick-red of the clay 
they carry with them from their banks. The peacock 
blue of the open sea bounds this red water with a 



i FIRST IMPRESSIONS 3T 

definite line, and the contrast in the bright sun is 
something very startling. Shallow banks of sand also 
reflect their pale yellow in many places, so that the 
brilliancy of this gulf exceeds anything I had ever seen 
in sea or lake. We pass the sites of iEgion, now 
Vostitza, once famous as the capital or centre (politic- 
ally) of the Achaean League, which is surrounded by 
a magnificent theatre of hills to the south — a prospect 
to be carefully noted by the passing traveller. We 
pass Sicyon, the home of Aratus, the great regenerator, 
the mean destroyer of that League, as you can still 
read in Plutarch's fascinating life of the man. But 
these places, like so many others in Greece, once 
famous, have now no trace of their greatness left above 
ground. The day may, however, still come when 
another Schliemann will unearth the records and 
fragments of a civilisation distinguished even in Greece 
for refinement. Sicyon was a famous school of art. 
Painting and sculpture flourished there, and there was 
a special school of Sicyon, whose features we can still 
recognise in extant copies of the famous statues they 
produced. There is a statue known as the Canon 
Statue, a model of human proportions, which was the 
work of the famous Polycleitus of Sicyon, and which 
we know from various imitations preserved at Rome 
and elsewhere. But we shall return in due time to 
Greek sculpture, and will not interrupt our journey at 
this moment. 

All that we have passed through hitherto may be 
classed under the title of 'first impressions.' The 
wild northern coast shows us but one inlet, the 
Gulf of Salona, with a little port of Itea at its head. 
This was the old highway to ascend to the oracle of 
Delphi, which we shall approach better from the 
Boeotian side. The giant Parnassus, rivalled by the 
snowy Korax on the west, and the lesser Helicon on the 



32 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

east, form the northern bar to our view. But now we 
strain our eyes to behold the great rock of Corinth, 
and to invade this, the first great centre of Greek life, 
which closes the long bav at its easternmost end. 

The train only stops a few minutes at New Corinth, 
and does not allow a glimpse of the splendours which 
we shall revisit at leisure. And then we pass out 
towards the Isthmus and its canal, which we cross at 
a sufficient height to let steamers pass under us, if 
steamers desire to do so. But when we saw this 
empty completion of many ancient and modern aspira- 
tions, we were only reminded of the two ancient fools 
who undertook such a work — Xerxes at Mount Athos, 
and with temporary success ; Nero here, but abortively. 
So we passed on to the rising country, covered with 
scattered pines, which leads us up to the Goranean 
Mountains, a great block which crosses the northern 
part of the Isthmus diagonallv, and forms the real 
barrier between the Peloponnese and the rest of Greece. 
The east extremity juts far into the Gulf of Corinth, 
and the path along the sea there is both narrow and 
very circuitous. The way followed by the train was 
the old highway notorious since mythical days for 
robbers, owing to its being cut along a precipice over 
the sea, which a few people with stones in their hands 
could make impracticable from above. There is, 
indeed, one central pass, which climbs the high moun- 
tain, as Professor Grundy assures me, but I suppose he 
is the only modern man who has made this experience. 
This is the feature of the Isthmus which makes us 
wonder at the folly of the Greeks proposing to build a 
wall across the flat country near the present canal, 
instead of occupving the mountain, which seems an 
impregnable fortress, against an attack from the north 
by land. It was certainly not insuperable, for 
Epaminondas with his Thebans crossed and recrossed 



i FIRST IMPRESSIONS 33 

it repeatedly, in spite of the efforts of the Spartans to 
bar his way. How he accomplished this feat, the 
jealous Xenophon will not tell us in his Hellenica. 

After running round these precipices, sometimes 
above, sometimes below, the modern road, we descend 
upon Megara, now a thriving town with a population 
still proud of their beauty, and where the women, 
dressed in dull blue and white, are peculiarly attractive. 
But here I pause, for we shall revisit Eleusis and 
Salamis again from Athens, and in a different con- 
nection. The train from Eleusis brings us with a 
great and tedious round to the north, through a saddle 
between Mounts iEgialus and Parnes, to the station at 
Athens, always full of noise and confusion. Before 
the train has even reached the outskirts of the plat- 
form, it is boarded by numbers of lads soliciting the 
traveller's patronage. 



CHAPTER II 

GENERAL IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS AND ATTICA 

There is probably no more exciting voyage, to any 
educated man, than the approach to Athens from the 
sea. Every promontory, every island, every bay, has 
its history. If he knows the map of Greece, he needs 
no guide-book or guide to distract him ; if he does 
not, he needs little Greek to ask of any one near him 
the name of this or that object; and the mere names 
are sufficient to stir up all his classical recollections, 
nay more, it will stir up any poetry that lurks in his 
soul. Every poet knows the magic that lies in great 
historic names, nay, every speaker who has addressed a 
large audience knows the thrill which the bare mention 
of great names sends through his hearers. But the 
traveller must make up his mind not to be shocked 
at Mgina or Phaleron, and even to be told that he is 
utterly wrong in his way of pronouncing them. 

It was my first fortune to come into Greece by 
night, with a splendid moon shining upon the summer 
sea. The varied outlines of Sunium, on the one side, 
and iEgina on the other, were very clear, but in the 
deep shadows there was mystery enough to feed the 
burning impatience to see it all in the light of com- 
mon day ; and though we had passed iEgina, and had 
come over against the rocky Salamis, as yet there was 
no sign of the Peiraeus. Then came the light on 

34 



chap, ii ATHENS AND ATTICA 35 

Psyttalea, and they told us that the harbour was right 
opposite. Yet we came nearer and nearer, and no 
harbour could be seen. The barren rocks of the 
coast seemed to form one unbroken line, and nowhere 
was there a sign of indentation or of break in the 
land. But, suddenly, as we turned from gazing on 
Psyttalea, where the flower of the Persian nobles had 
once stood in despair, looking upon their fate gathering 
about them, the vessel had turned eastward, and 
discovered to us the crowded lights and thronging 
ships of the famous harbour. Small it looked, very 
small, but evidently deep to the water's edge, for 
great ships seemed touching the shore; and so narrow 
is the mouth, that we almost wondered how they had 
made their entrance in safety. But I saw it some 
years later, with nine men-of-war towering above all 
its merchant shipping and its steamers, and among 
them crowds of ferry-boats skimming about in the 
breeze with their wing-like sails. Then it came 
home to me that, like the rest of Greece, the Peiraeus 
was far larger than it looked. 

It differed little, alas ! from more vulgar harbours 
in the noise and confusion of disembarking; in the 
delays of its custom-house ; in the extortion and 
insolence of its boatmen. It is still, as in Plato's 
day, 'the haunt of sailors, where good manners are 
unknown.' But when we had escaped the turmoil, 
and were seated silently on the way to Athens, almost 
along the very road of classical days, all our classical 
notions, which had been scared away by vulgar 
bargaining and protesting, regained their sway. We 
had sailed in through the narrow passage where 
almost every great Greek that ever lived had some 
time passed ; now we went along the line, hardly less 
certain, which had seen all these great ones going 
to and fro between the city and the port. The 



36 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

present road is shaded with great silver poplars and 
plane-trees, and the moon had set, so that our 
approach to Athens was even more mysterious than 
our approach to the Peiraeus. We were, moreover, 
perplexed at our carriage stopping under some large 
plane-trees, though we had driven but two miles, and 
the night was far spent. Our coachman would listen 
to no advice or persuasion. We learned afterwards 
that every carriage going to and from the Peiraeus 
stops at this half-way house, that the horses may 
drink, and the coachman take c Turkish delight ' and 
water. There is no exception made to this custom, 
and the traveller is bound to submit. At last we 
entered the unpretending ill-built streets at the west 
of Athens. 

The stillness of the night is a phenomenon hardly 
known in that city. No sooner have men and horses 
gone to rest than all the dogs and cats of the town 
come out to bark and yell about the thoroughfares. 
Athens, like all parts of modern Greece, abounds in 
dogs. You cannot pass a sailing-boat in the Levant 
without seeing a dog looking over the tafFrail, and 
barking at you as you pass. Every ship in the 
Peiraeus has at least one, often a great many, on 
board. I suppose every house in Athens is provided 
with one. These creatures seem to make it their 
business to prevent silence and rest all the night long. 
They were ably seconded by cats and crowing cocks, 
as well as by an occasional wakeful donkey ; and both 
cats and donkeys seemed to have voices of almost 
tropical violence. 

So the night wore away under rapidly-growing 
adverse impressions. How is a man to admire art 
and revere antiquity if he is robbed of his repose ? 
The Greeks sleep so much in the day that they 
seem indifferent to nightly disturbances ; and, perhaps, 



ii ATHENS AND ATTICA 37 

after many years' habit, even Athenian caterwauling 
may fail to rouse the sleeper. But what chance has 
the passing traveller ? Even the strongest ejacula- 
tions are but a narrow outlet for his feelings. 

In this state of mind, then, I rose at break of dawn 
to see whether the window would afford any prospect 
to serve as a balm for angry sleeplessness. And there, 
right opposite, stood the rock which of all rocks in 
the world's history has done most for literature and 
art — the rock which poets, and orators, and architects, 
and historians have ever glorified, and cannot stay 
their praise — which is ever new and ever old, ever 
fresh in its decay, ever perfect in its ruin, ever living 
in its death — the Acropolis of Athens. 

When I saw my dream and longing of many years 
fulfilled, the first rays of the rising sun had just 
touched the heights, while the town below was still 
hid in gloom. Rock, and rampart, and ruined fanes — 
all were coloured in harmonious tints ; the lights 
were of a deep rich orange, and the shadows of dark 
crimson, with the deeper lines of purple. There was 
no variety in colour between what nature and what 
man had set there. No whiteness shone from the 
marble, no smoothness showed upon the hewn and 
polished blocks ; but the whole mass of orange and 
crimson stood out together into the pale, pure Attic 
air. There it stood, surrounded by lanes and hovels, 
still perpetuating the great old contrast in Greek 
history, of magnificence and meanness — of loftiness 
and lowness — as well in outer life as in inward motive. 
And, as if in illustration of that art of which it was 
the most perfect bloom, and which lasted in perfection 
but a day of history, I saw it again and again, in sun- 
light and in shade, in daylight and at night, but never 
again in this perfect and singular beauty. 1 

1 Once again, in a very different land, and under widely different cir- 



38 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

If we except the Acropolis, there are only two 
striking buildings of classical antiquity within the 
modern town of Athens — the so-called Temple of 
Theseus and the few standing columns of Hadrian's 
great temple to Zeus. The latter is, indeed, very 
remarkable. The pillars stand on a vacant platform, 
once the site of the gigantic temple ; the Acropolis 
forms a noble background ; away towards Phalerum 
stretch undulating hills which hide the sea ; to the 
left (if we look from the town), Mount Hymettus 
raises its barren slopes ; and in the valley, immediately 
below the pillars, flows the famous little Ilissus, glorified 
for ever by the poetry of Plato, and in its summer-dry 
bed the fountain from which the Athenian maidens 
still draw water — water the purest and best in the 
city. It wells out from under a great limestone rock, 
all plumed with the rich Capillus Veneris^ which seems 
to find out and frame with its delicate green every 
natural spring in Greece. 1 

But the pillars of the Temple of Zeus, though very 
stately and massive, and with their summits spanned 
by huge blocks of architrave, are still not Athenian, 
not Attic, not (if I may say so) genuine Greek work ; 
for the Corinthian capitals, which are here seen per- 
haps in their greatest perfection, cannot be called pure 

cumstances, did I see this strange harmony of orange and crimson. Waking 
at dawn in a long and dreary train journey across the great prairie of 
Colorado in America, I saw all the sky dappled over with crimson clouds, 
while the vast surface of the prairie, covered with dry grass, was nothing 
but a great plain of brown orange. There was not a house, a tree, a 
living thing of any kind to be seen — nothing but the solemnity of 
gorgeously coloured silence. It was far the finest sight I ever saw in 
America. 

1 It was formerly identified with the fountain of nine jets which 
Thucydides in a famous passage speaks of as the sacred water used by 
Attic maidens who lived in the old city on the rock. Dr. DOrpfeld has 
shown that the Enneacrounos lay much nearer the ascent to the rock, 
and that the Peisistratidae brought water in conduits to it from far up 
the river. 



ii ATHENS AND ATTICA 39 

Greek taste. As is well known, they were hardly 
ever used, and never used prominently, till the Graeco- 
Roman stage of art. The older Greeks seem to have 
had a fixed objection to intricate ornamentation in 
their larger temples. All the greater temples of 
Greece and Greek Italy are of the Doric Order, with 
its perfectly plain capital. Groups of figures were 
admitted upon the pediments and metopes, because 
these groups formed clear and massive designs visible 
from a distance. But such intricacies as those of the 
Corinthian capital were not approved, except in small 
monuments, which were merely intended for close 
inspection, and where delicate ornament gave grace 
to a building which could not lay claim to grandeur. 
Such is clearly the case with the only purely Greek 
(as opposed to Graeco- Roman) monument of the 
Corinthian Order, which is still standing — the 
Choragic monument of Lysicrates at Athens. It 
was also the case with that beautiful little temple, or 
group of temples, known as the Erechtheum, which, 
standing beside the great massive Parthenon on the 
Acropolis of Athens, presents the very contrast upon 
which I am insisting. It is small and essentially graceful, 
being built in the Ionic style, with rich ornamentation ; 
while the Parthenon is massive, and, in spite of much 
ornamentation, very severe in its plainer Doric style. 

But to return to the pillars of Hadrian's Temple. 
They are about fifty-five feet high, by six and a half feet 
in diameter, and no Corinthian pillar of this colossal 
size would ever have been set up by the Greeks in 
their better days. So, then, in spite of the grandeur 
of these isolated remains — a grandeur not destroyed, 
perhaps even not diminished, by coffee tables, and 
inquiring waiters, and military bands, and a vulgar 
crowd about their base — to the student of really Greek 
art they are not of the highest interest ; nay, they 



40 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

even suggest to him what the Periclean Greeks would 
have done had they, with such resources, completed 
the great temple ultimately due to the munificence' of 
the Roman Emperor. 

Let us turn, in preference, to the Temple of 
Theseus, 1 at the opposite extremity of the town, it 
too standing upon a clear platform, and striking the 
traveller with its symmetry and its completeness, as 
he approaches from the Peiraeus. It is in every way 
a contrast to the temple of which we have just spoken. 
It is very small — in fact, so small in comparison with 
the Parthenon, or the great temple at Paestum, that 
we are disappointed with it ; and yet it is built, not in 
the richly-decorated Ionic style of the Erechtheum, but 
in severe Doric ; and though small and plain, it is very 
perfect — as perfect as any such relic that we have. 
It is many centuries older than Hadrian's great temple. 
It could have been destroyed with one-tenth of the 
trouble, and yet it still stands almost in its perfection. 
The reason is simply this. Few of the great classical 
temples suffered much from wanton destruction till 
the Middle Ages. Now, in the Middle Ages this 
temple, as well as the Parthenon, was usurped by the 
Greek Church, and turned into a place of Christian 
worship. So, then, the little Temple of Theseus has 
escaped the ravages which the last few centuries — 

1 By the way, the appellation ' Temple of Theseus ' is more than 
doubtful. The building fronts towards the east. This is proved by the 
greater size, and more elaborate decoration of the eastern portal. It is 
almost certain, according to an old scholion on Pindar, that the temples 
of heroes like Theseus faced west, while those only of the Olympian 
gods faced the rising sun. The temple, therefore, was the temple, not 
of a hero, but of a god. Probably the Temple of Heracles, worshipped 
as a god at Athens, which is mentioned in the scholia of Aristophanes as 
situated in this part of Athens, is to be identified with the building in 
question. But I suppose for years to come we must be content to abide 
by the old name of Theseon, which is now too long in general use to be 
easily disturbed. 



ii ATHENS AND ATTICA 41 

worse than all that went before — have made in the 
remains of a noble antiquity. To those who desire 
to study the effect of the Doric Order this temple 
appears to me an admirable specimen. From its 
small size and clear position, all its points are very 
easily taken in. 'Such,' says Bishop Wordsworth, c is 
the integrity of its structure, and the distinctness of 
its details, that it requires no description beyond that 
which a few glances might supply. Its beauty defies 
all : its solid yet graceful form is, indeed, admirable ; 
and the loveliness of its colouring is such that, from 
the rich mellow hue which the marble has now 
assumed, it looks as if it had been quarried, not from 
the bed of a rocky mountain, but from the golden 
light of an Athenian sunset.' And in like terms 
many others have spoken. 

I have only one reservation to make. The Doric 
Order being essentially massive, it seems to me that 
this beautiful temple lacks one essential feature of that 
Order, and therefore, after the first survey, after a 
single walk about it, it loses to the traveller who has 
seen Paestum, and who presently cannot fail to see 
the Parthenon, that peculiar effect of massiveness — of 
almost Egyptian solidity — which is ever present, and 
ever imposing, in these huger Doric temples. It 
seems as if the Athenians themselves felt this — that 
the plain simplicity of its style was not effective 
without size — and accordingly decorated this struc- 
ture with colours more richly than their other temples. 
All the reliefs and raised ornaments seem to have been 
painted ; other decorations were added in colour on 
the flat surfaces, so that the whole temple must have 
been a mass of rich variegated hues, of which blue, 
green, and red are still distinguishable, — or were in 
Stuart's time, — and in which bronze and gilding 
certainly played an important part. 



42 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

We are thus brought naturally face to face with 
one of the peculiarities of old Greek art most difficult 
to realise, and still more to appreciate. 1 We can 
recognise in Egyptian and in Assyrian art the richness 
and appropriateness of much colouring. Modern 
painters are becoming so alive to this, that among the 
most striking pictures in our Royal Academy in 
London have been seen, for some years back, scenes 
from old Egyptian and Assyrian life, in which the 
rich colouring of the architecture has been quite a 
prominent feature. 

But in Greek art — in the perfect symmetry of the 
Greek temple, in the perfect grace of the Greek 
statue — we come to think form of such paramount 
importance, that we look on the beautiful Parian and 
Pentelic marbles as specially suited for the expression 
of form apart from colour. There is even something 
in unity of tone that delights the modern eye. Thus, 
though we feel that the old Greek temples have lost 
all their original brightness, yet, as I have quoted 
from Bishop Wordsworth, the rich mellow hue which 
tones all these ruins has to us its peculiar charm. 
The same rich yellow brown, almost the colour of the 
Roman travertine, is one of the most striking features 
in the splendid remains which have made Paestum 
unique in all Italy. This colour contrasts beautifully 
with the blue sky of southern Europe ; it lights up 
with extraordinary richness in the rising or setting 
sun. We can easily conceive that were it proposed 
to restore the Attic temples to their pristine white- 

1 The following remarks on the polychromy of Greek art are not 
intended for Professors of Fine Art, to whom, indeed, few things in this 
book, if true, can be new, but for the ordinary reader, who may not have 
seen it discussed elsewhere. I am glad to add that the recent exhibitions 
of sculpture in the Royal Academy of Arts in London, show, in addition 
to other signs of new life, a growing appreciation of the value of colour 
in statuary. 



ii ATHENS AND ATTICA 43 

ness, we should feel a severe shock, and beg to have 
these venerable buildings left in the soberness of their 
acquired colour. Still more does it shock us to be 
told that great sculptors, with Parian marble at hand, 
preferred to set up images of the gods in gold and 
ivory, or, still worse, with parts of gold and ivory ; 
and that they thought it right to fill out the eyes 
with precious stones, and set gilded wreaths upon 
coloured hair. 

When we first come to realise these things, we are 
likely to exclaim against such a jumble, as we should 
call it, of painting and architecture — still worse, of 
painting and sculpture. Nor is it possible or reason- 
able that we should at once submit to such a revolu- 
tion in our artistic ideas, and bow without criticism 
to these startling features in Greek art. But if blind 
obedience to these our great masters in the laws of 
beauty is not to be commended, neither is an absolute 
resistance to all argument to be respected ; nor do I 
acknowledge the good sense or the good taste of that 
critic who insists that nothing can possibly equal the 
colour and texture of white marble, and that all 
colouring of such a substance is the mere remains 
of barbarism. For, say what we will, the Greeks 
were certainly, as a nation, the best judges of beauty 
the world has yet seen. And this is not all. The 
beauty of which they were evidently most fond was 
beauty of form — harmony of proportions, symmetry 
of design. They always hated the tawdry and the 
extravagant. As to their literature, there is no 
poetry, no oratory, no history, which is less decorated 
with the flowers of rhetoric : it is all pure in design, 
chaste in detail. So with their dress; so with their 
dwellings. We cannot but feel that, had the effect of 
painted temples and statues been tawdry, there is no 
people on earth who would have felt it so keenly, and 



44 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

disliked it so much. There must, then, have been 
strong reasons why this bright colouring did not 
strike their eye as we imagine it would the eye of 
sober moderns. 

To any one who has seen the country, and thought 
about the question there, many such reasons present 
themselves. In the first place, all through southern 
Europe, and more especially in Greece, there is an 
amount of bright colour in nature, which prevents 
almost any artificial colouring from producing a start- 
ling effect. Where all the landscape, the sea, and the 
air are exceedingly bright, we find the inhabitants 
increasing the brightness of their dress and houses, as 
it were to correspond with nature. Thus, in Italy, 
they paint their houses green, and pink, and yellow, 
and so give to their towns and villas that rich and 
warm effect which we miss so keenly among the grey 
and sooty streets of northern Europe. So also in their 
dress, these people wear scarlet, and white, and rich 
blue, not so much in patterns as in large patches, and 
a festival in Calabria or Greece fills the streets with 
intense colour. We know that the colouring of the 
old Greek dress was quite of the same character as 
that of the modern, though in design it has com- 
pletely changed. We must, therefore, imagine the 
old Greek crowd before their temples, or in their 
market-places, a very white crowd, with patches of 
scarlet and various blue ; perhaps altogether white in 
processions, if we except scarlet shoe-straps and other 
such slight relief. One cannot but feel that a richly 
coloured temple — that pillars of blue and red — that 
friezes of gilding, and other ornament, upon a white 
marble ground, or in white marble framing, must 
have been a splendid and appropriate background, a 
genial feature, in such a sky and with such costume. 
We must get accustomed to such combinations — we 



ii ATHENS AND ATTICA 45 

must dwell upon them in imagination, or ask our good 
painters to restore them for us, and let us look upon 
them constantly and calmly. 

The public buildings of Athens — the Academy, 
the University — where much colour is added to white 
marble, are to my mind among the most effective 
public buildings in Europe. 

But I must say a word, before passing on, concern- 
ing the statues. No doubt, the painting of statues, 
and the use of gold and ivory upon them, were de- 
rived from a rude age, when no images existed but 
rude wooden work — at first a mere block, then 
roughly altered and reduced to shape, probably re- 
quiring some colouring to produce any effect what- 
ever. To a public accustomed from childhood to 
such painted, and often richly - dressed images, a 
pure white marble statue must appear utterly cold and 
lifeless. So it does to us, when we have become 
accustomed to the mellow tints of old and even 
weather-stained Greek statues j and it should here be 
noticed that this mellow skin -surface on antique 
statues is not the mere result of age, but of an arti- 
ficial process, whereby they burnt into the surface a 
composition of wax and oil, which gave a yellowish 
tone to the marble, as well as also that peculiar sur- 
face which so accurately represents the texture of the 
human skin. But if we imagine all the marble 
surfaces and reliefs in the temple coloured for archi- 
tectural richness' sake, we can feel even more strongly 
how cold and out-of-place would be a perfectly colour- 
less statue in the centre of all this pattern. 

I will go further, and say we can point out cases 
where colouring greatly heightens the effect and 
beauty of sculpture/ The first is from the bronzes 
found at Herculaneum, now in the museum at Naples. 
Though they are not marble, they are suitable for our 



46 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

purpose, being naturally of a single dark-brown hue, 
which is indeed even more unfavourable (we should 
think) for such treatment. In some of the finest of 
these bronzes — especially in the two young men start- 
ing for a race — the eyeballs are inserted in white, with 
iris and pupil coloured. Nothing can be more striking 
and lifelike than the effect produced. There is in the 
Varvakion at Athens a marble mask, found in the 
Temple of iEsculapius, under the south side of the 
Acropolis, probably an ex voto offered for a recovery 
from some disease of the eyes. This marble face also 
has its eyes coloured in the most striking and lifelike 
way, and is one of the most curious objects found in 
the late excavations. 

I will add one remarkable modern example — the 
monument at Florence to a young Indian prince, who 
visited England and this country some years ago, and 
died of fever during his homeward voyage. They 
have set up to him a richly coloured and gilded bal- 
dachin, in the open air, and in a quiet, wooded park. 
Under this covering is a life-sized bust of the prince, 
in his richest state dress. The whole bust — the 
turban, the face, the drapery — all is coloured to the 
life, and the dress, of course, of the most gorgeous 
variety. The turban is chiefly white, striped with 
gold, in strong contrast to the mahogany complexion 
and raven hair of the actual head ; the robe is gold 
and green, and covered with ornament. The general 
effect is, from the very first moment, striking and 
beautiful. The longer it is studied, the better it 
appears ; and there is hardly a reasonable spectator 
who will not confess that, were we to replace the 
present bust with a copy of it in white marble, the 
beauty and harmony of the monument would be 
utterly marred. To those who have the opportunity 
of visiting Greece or Italy, I strongly commend these 



ii ATHENS AND ATTICA 47 

specimens of coloured buildings aad sculpture. When 
they have seen them, they will hesitate to condemn 
what we still hear called the curiously bad taste of 
the old Greeks in their use of colour in the plastic 
arts. 1 

But these archaeological discussions are digressions, 
only tolerable if they are not too long. I revert to 
the general state of the antiquities at Athens, always 
reserving the Acropolis for a special chapter. As I 
said, the isolated pillars of Hadrian's Temple of Zeus, 
and the so-called Temple of Theseus, are the only 
very striking objects. There are, of course, many 
other buildings, or remains of buildings. There is 
the monument of Lysicrates — a small and very grace- 
ful round chamber, adorned with Corinthian engaged 
pillars, and with friezes of the school of Scopas, in- 
tended to carry on its summit the tripod Lysicrates 
had gained in a musical and dramatic contest (334 
B.C.) at Athens. 2 There is the later Temple of the 
Winds, as it is called — a sort of public clock, with 
sundials and fine reliefs of the Wind -gods on its 
outward surfaces, and arrangements for a water- 
clock within. There are two portals, or gateways 

1 Let me add that in the Luxembourg at Paris there is, among 
numbers of groups in white marble, a draped figure in three colours — the 
skin white, the hood over the head alabaster, the dress red variegated 
marble. Let the reader study this very striking example of polychromy. 
But every year there are more specimens of the use of colour in the 
striking revival of modern sculpture. 

2 This beautiful monument has been so defaced and mutilated that 
the photographs of to-day give no idea of its decoration. The careful 
drawings and restorations of Stuart and Revett were made in the 18th 
century, when it was still comparatively intact, and it is through their 
book alone that we can now estimate the merits of many of the ancient 
buildings of Athens. It should be added that there was a solitary 
Corinthian capital found in the temple of Bassae, which I will describe 
in another chapter. But this still affords an unsolved problem. The 
Philippeion at Olympia (built by the famous Philip of Macedon) also 
contained an inner circle of Corinthian pillars, while the outer circle was 
Ionic. 



48 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

— one leading into the old agora, or market-place, the 
other leading from old Athens into the Athens of 
Hadrian. 

But all these buildings are either miserably defaced, 
or of such late date and decayed taste as to make them 
unworthy specimens of pure Greek art. A single 
century ago there was much to be seen and admired 
which has since disappeared ; and even to-day the 
majority of the population are careless as to the treat- 
ment of ancient monuments, and sometimes even 
mischievous in wantonly defacing them. Thus, I 
saw the marble tombs of Ottfried M tiller and Charles 
Lenormant — tombs which, though modern, were yet 
erected at the cost of the nation to men who were 
eminent lovers and students of Greek art — I saw these 
tombs (in 1875) used as common targets by the 
neighbourhood, and all peppered with marks of shot 
and of bullets. I saw them, too, all but blown up by 
workmen blasting for building -stones close beside 
them. I saw, also, from the Acropolis, a young gentle- 
man practising with a pistol at a piece of old carved 
marble work in the Theatre of Dionysus. His object 
seemed to be to chip off a piece from the edge at every 
shot. Happily, on this occasion, our vantage ground 
enabled us to take the law into our own hands -, and 
after in vain appealing to a custodian to interfere, we 
adopted the tactics of Apollo at Delphi, and by detach- 
ing stones from the top of our precipice, we put to 
flight the wretched bafbarian who had come to ravage 
the treasures of that most sacred place. I am bound 
to add that such Vandalism would not now be tolerated, 
so that here at least there is progress. 

These unhappy examples of the defacing of archi- 
tectural monuments, which can hardly be removed, 
naturally suggest to the traveller in Greece the kindred 
question how all the smaller and movable antiquities 



ii ATHENS AND ATTICA 49 

that are found should be distributed so as best to 
promote the love and knowledge of art. 

On this point it seems to me that we have gone to 
one extreme, and the Greeks to the other, and that 
neither of us have done our best to make known what 
ought to be known as widely as possible. The 
tendency in England, at least of later years, has been to 
swallow up all lesser and all private collections in the 
great national Museum in London, which has accord- 
ingly become so enormous and so bewildering that 
no one can profit by it except the trained specialist, 
who goes in with his eyes shut, and will not open 
them till he has arrived at the particular objects he 
intends to examine. But to the ordinary public, and 
even the generally enlightened public (if such an 
expression be not a contradiction in terms), there is 
nothing so utterly bewildering, and therefore so un- 
profitable, as a visit to the myriad treasures of that 
great world of curiosities. 

In the last century many private persons — many 
noblemen of wealth and culture — possessed remarkable 
collections of antiquities. These have mostly been 
swallowed up by what is called c the nation,' and new 
private collections are very rare. 

In Greece the very opposite course is being now 
pursued. By a special law it is forbidden to sell out 
of the country, or even to remove from a district, any 
antiquities whatever ; and inconsequence little museums 
have been established in every village in Greece — nay, 
sometimes even in places where there is no village, in 
order that every district may possess its own riches, 
and become worth a visit from the traveller and the 
antiquary. I have seen such museums at Eleusis, some 
fifteen miles from Athens, at Thebes, now an unim- 
portant town, at Livadia, at Chaeronea, at Argos, at 
Olympia, and even in the wild plains of Orchomenus, 

E 



50 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

in a little chapel, with no town within miles. 1 If I 
add to this that most of these museums were mere 
dark outhouses, only lighted through the door, the 
reader will have some notion what a task it would be 
to visit and criticise, with any attempt at completeness, 
the ever-increasing remnants of classical Greece. 

The traveller is at first disposed to complain that 
even the portable antiquities found in various parts of 
Greece are not brought to Athens, and gathered into 
one vast national museum. Further reflection shows 
such a proceeding to be not only impossible, but highly 
inexpedient. I will not speak of the great waste of 
objects of interest when they are brought together in 
such vast masses that the visitor is rather oppressed 
than enlightened. Nor will I give the smallest weight 
to the selfish local argument, that compelling visitors 
to wander from place to place brings traific and money 
into the country. Until proper roads and clean inns 
are established, such an argument is both unfair and 
unlikely to produce results worth considering. But 
fortunately most of the famous things in Greece are 
sites, ruined buildings, forts which cannot be removed 
from their place, if at all, without destruction, and of 
which the very details cannot be understood without 
seeing the place for which they were intended. Even 
the Parthenon sculptures in London would have lost 
most of their interest, if the building itself at Athens 
did not show us their application, and glorify them 
with its splendour. He who sees the gold of Mycenae 
at Athens, knows little of its meaning, if he has not 
visited the giant forts where its owners once dwelt 
and exercised their sway ; and if, as has been done at 

1 It is fair to add that an exception has been made for the discoveries 
at Mycenae, which have been almost all brought to Athens j and that a 
handsome museum has now been built at Olympia, and a good road from 
Pyrgos, which has a railway to the sea. 



a ATHENS AND ATTICA 51 

Olympia, some patriotic Greek had built a safe museum 
at Mycenae to contain them, they would be more deeply 
interesting and instructive than they now are. 

In such a town as Athens, on the contrary, it seems 
to me that the true solution of the problem had been 
attained, though it has been abandoned for a central 
museum. There are (or were) at Athens at least six 
separate museums of antiquities — one at the University, 
one called the Varvakion, one in the Theseum, one, 
or rather two, on the Acropolis, one in the Ministry 
of Public Instruction, and lastly, the new National 
Museum, as it is called, in Patissia Street — devoted to 
its special treasures. If these several storehouses had 
been thoroughly kept, — if the objects were carefully 
numbered and catalogued, — I can conceive no better 
arrangement for studying separately and in detail the 
various monuments, which must always bewilder and 
fatigue when crowded together in one vast exhibition. 
If the British Museum were in this way severed into 
many branches, and the different classes of objects it 
contains were placed in separate buildings, and in 
different parts of London, I believe most of us would 
acquire a far greater knowledge of what it contains, 
and hence it would attain a greater usefulness in 
educating the nation. To visit any one of the 
Athenian museums was a comparatively short and 
easy task, where a man can see the end of his labour 
before him, and hence will not hesitate to delay long 
over such things as are worth a careful study. 

It may be said that all this digression about the 
mere placing of monuments is delaying the reader too 
long from what he desires to know — something about 
the monuments themselves. But this little book, to 
copy an expression of Herodotus, particularly affects 
digressions. I desire to take my readers through the 
subject exactly in the way in which I wandered through 



52 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap.ii 

it myself. As a critic said of it long ago, the rambles 
in it are studies and the studies rambles. Those who 
want an accurate catalogue of the facts will find it in 
the guide-books, which are excellent. 1 

Before passing into Attica and leaving Athens, 
something more must, of course, be said of the 
museums, of the newer diggings, and of the tombs 
found in the Kerameikus. We will then mount the 
Acropolis, and wander leisurely about its marvellous 
ruins. From it we can look out upon the general 
shape and disposition of Attica, and plan our shorter 
excursions. 

1 Since this was first written there have been published (in German) 
two careful catalogues of the sculptures of Athens by V. Sybel and by 
Milchhbfer (1881), and there is the new edition of Baedeker's Handbook 
(1905), published both in German and English. The French Guide 
Joanne is a very good and practical book, though not so new. The last 
edition of Murray's Handbook is very dear and not very satisfactory. 
There is a small Greek Catalogue published by Stanford, translated by 
Miss Agnes Smith. The Mycenaean antiquities are described in a separate 
book by Schliemann, and by Schuchhardt. 



CHAPTER III 

ATHENS THE MUSEUMS THE TOMBS 

Now that the Museums of Athens have been set in 
order, and well arranged, the visitor cannot but still 
feel some disappointment not only at the poverty in 
works of the golden age, but also at the mutilated 
condition of what has survived. In Italy restorations, 
generally faulty, have at least produced their general 
effect. 

But I am bound to add that every patient observer 
who sets to work in spite of his disappointment, and 
examines with honest care these 'disjecta membra' of 
Attic art — any one who will replace in imagination 
the tips of noses — any one who will stoop over lying 
statues, and guess at the context of broken limbs — 
such an observer will find his vexation gradually 
changing into wonder, and will at last come to see 
that all the smoothly-restored Greek work in Italian 
museums is not worth a tithe of some shattered frag- 
ments in the real home and citadel of pure art. This 
is especially true of the museum on the Acropolis. It 
is, however, also true of the other museums, and more 
obviously true of the reliefs upon the tombs. The 
assistance of an experienced Athenian antiquary is also 
required, who knows his way among the fragments, 
and who can tell the history of the discovery, and the 
theories of the purport of each. There are a good 

53 



54 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

many men of ability and learning connected with the 
University of Athens, who describe each object in the 
antiquarian papers as it is discovered. But when I 
asked whether I could buy or subscribe to any recog- 
nised organ for such information, I was told (as I 
might have expected) that no single paper or periodical 
was so recognised. Clashing interests and personal 
friendships determine where each discovery is to be 
announced ; so that often the professedly archaeological 
journals contain no mention of such things, while the 
common daily papers secure the information. 1 

Here, again, we feel the want of some stronger 
government — some despotic assertion of a law of 
gravitation to a common centre — to counteract the 
centrifugal forces acting all through Greek society. 
The old autonomy of the Greeks — that old assertion of 
local independence which was at once their greatness 
and their ruin — this strong instinct has lasted un- 
diminished to the present day. They seem even now 
to hate c pulling together,' as we say. They seem 
always ready to assert their individual rights and 
claims against those of the community or the public. 
The old Greeks had as a safeguard their divisions into 
little cities and territories ; so that their passion for 
autonomy was expended on their city interests, in 
which the individual could forget himself. But as the 
old Greeks were often too selfish for this, and asserted 
their personal autonomy against their own city, so the 
modern Greek, who has not this safety-valve, finds it 
difficult to rise to the height of acting in the interests 
of the nation at large ; and though he converses much 
and brilliantly about Hellenic unity, he generally 

1 Scholars can find in the Transactions of the Archaeological Society 
of Athens, in the Mhtheilungen of the German Institute, and the Bulletin 
of the French School of Athens all they desire, but not without con- 
siderable waiting. 



in ATHENS— THE MUSEUMS 55 

allows smaller interests to outweigh this splendid 
general conception. I will here add a most annoying 
example of this particularist feeling, which obtrudes 
itself upon every visitor to Athens. The most trying 
thing in the streets is the want of shade, and the con- 
sequent glare of the houses and roadway. Yet along 
every street there are planted pepper trees of graceful 
growth and of delicious scent. But why are they all 
so wretchedly small and bare ? Because each in- 
habitant chooses to hack away the growing branches 
in front of his own door. The Prime Minister, who 
deplored this curious Vandalism, said he was powerless 
to check it. Until, however, the Athenians learn to 
control themselves, and let their trees grow, Athens 
will be an ugly and disagreeable city. 

So, then, the Greeks will not even agree to tell us 
where we may find a complete list of newly-discovered 
antiquities. Nor, indeed, does the Athenian public 
care very much, beyond a certain vague pride, for 
such things, if we except one peculiar kind, which 
took among them somewhat the place of old china 
among us. There have been found in many Greek 
cemeteries — in Megara, in Cyrene, still more in 
great abundance and excellence at Tanagra, in Boeotia 
— little figures of terra-cotta, often delicately modelled 
and richly coloured both in dress and limbs. These 
figures are ordinarily from eight to twelve inches high, 
and represent ladies both sitting and standing in grace- 
ful attitudes, young men in pastoral life, and other 
such subjects. I was informed that some had been 
found in various places through Greece, but the main 
source of them — and a very rich source — was the 
Necropolis at Tanagra. There are several collections 
of these figures in cupboards and cabinets in private 
houses at Athens, all remarkable for the marvellous 
modernness of their appearance. The graceful drapery 



56 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

of the ladies is very like modern dress, and many have 
on their heads flat round hats, quite similar in design 
to the gipsy hats much worn among ladies of late 
years. But above all, the hair was drawn back from 
the forehead, not at all in what is considered Greek 
style, but rather a P 'Eugenie, as we used to say when 
we were young. Many hold in their hands large fans, 
like those which we make of peacocks' feathers. No 
conclusive theory has yet been started, so far as I 
know, concerning the object or intention of these 
figures. So many of them are female figures, that it 
seems unlikely they were portraits of the deceased ; 
and the frequent occurrence of two figures together, 
especially one woman being carried by another, seems 
almost to dissuade us from such a theory. They seem 
to be the figures called Ko/>cu by many old Greeks, 
which were used as toys by children, and, perhaps, as 
ornaments. The large class of tradesmen who made 
them were called KopoTrXaOot, and were held in con- 
tempt by real sculptors. Most of them are, indeed, 
badly modelled, and evidently the work of ignorant 
tradesmen. If it could be shown that they were only 
found in the graves of children, it would be a touching 
sign of that world-wide feeling among the human race, 
to bury with the dead friend whatever he loved and 
enjoyed in his life on earth, that he might not feel 
lonely in his cold and gloomy grave. 1 But it seems 
unlikely that this limitation can ever be proved. 

There is an equal difficulty as to their age. The 

1 There is no more pathetic instance than that described by Mr. 
Squier (in his admirable work on Peru) of the tomb of a young girl 
which he himself discovered, and where he comments on the various 
objects laid to rest with the dead : cf. Squier's Peru, p. 80. There has 
since been found at Myrina, on the Asiatic coast, a great store of these 
clay figures, also in tombs. Some sets of them were made to represent 
the sculptures of a pediment, such as that of the Parthenon, or rather 0/ 
the east front of the temple of Olympia. 



in ATHENS— THE MUSEUMS 57 

Greeks say that the tombs in which they are found 
are not later than the second century B.C., and it is, 
indeed, hard to conceive at what later period there was 
enough wealth and art to produce such often elegant, 
and often costly, results. Tanagra and Thespiae were, 
in Strabo's day, 1 the only remaining cities of Bceotia ; 
the rest, he says, were but ruins and names. But we 
may be certain that in that time of universal decay the 
remaining towns must have been as poor and insignifi- 
cant as they now are. Thus, we seem thrown back 
into classical or Alexandrian days for the origin of 
these figures, which in their bright colouring — pink 
and blue dresses, often gilded fringes, the hair always 
fair, so far as I could find — are, indeed, like what we 
know of old Greek statuary, but in other respects 
surprisingly modern. 2 If their antiquity can be 
strictly demonstrated, it will but show another case 
of the versatility of the Greeks in all things relating 
to art : how, with the simplest material, and at a long 
distance from the great art centres, they produced a 
type of exceeding grace and refinement totally foreign 
to their great old models, varying in dress, attitude — 
in every point of style — from ordinary Greek sculpture, 
and anticipating much of the modern ideals of beauty 
and elegance. 

But it is necessary to suspend our judgment, and 
wait for further and closer investigation. The work- 
men at Tanagra were forbidden to sell these objects 
to private fanciers ; and in consequence, their price 
rose so enormously, that those in the market, if of real 
elegance and artistic merit, could not be obtained for 

1 Lib. ix. 2. 

a If I mistake not, Mr. A. S. Murray was disposed to date them 
about the first century either b.c. or a.v., thus bringing them down to 
about the time of Strabo. Owing to the many modern fabrications of 
them, the fashion of collecting them seems to have gone out of late 
years. 



58 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

less than from ^40 to ^60. As much as 2000 francs 
has been paid for one, when they were less common. 
From this price downward they can still be bought in 
Athens, the rude and badly finished specimens being 
cheap enough. The only other method of procuring 
them, or of procuring them more cheaply, is to make 
diligent inquiries when travelling in the interior, 
where they may often be bought from poor people, 
either at Megara, Tanagra, or elsewhere, who have 
chanced to find them, and are willing enough to part 
with them after a certain amount of bargaining. 

It is convenient to dispose of this peculiar and dis- 
tinct kind of Greek antiquities, because they seem 
foreign to the rest, and cannot be brought under any 
other head. These figurines have now found their 
way into most European museums. 1 

I pass to the public collections at Athens, in which 
we find few of these figures, and which rather contain 
the usual products of Greek plastic art — statues, reliefs, 
as well as pottery and inscriptions. As I have said, 
the statues are in the most lamentable condition, 
shattered into fragments, without any attempt at 
restoring even such losses as can be supplied with 
certainty. What mischief might be done by such 
wholesale restoration as was practised in Italy some 
fifty years ago, it is hard to say. But perhaps the 
reaction against that error has driven us to an opposite 
extreme. 

There is, indeed, one — a naked athlete, with his 
cloak hanging over the left shoulder, and coiled round 
the left forearm — which seems almost as good as any 
strong male figure which we now possess. While it 

1 There is already quite a large collection of them in the British 
Museum, e.g. Vase Room I., case 35, where there are many of these 
figures from Tanagra. In Room II. there is a whole case of them, 
chiefly from Cyrene, and from Cnidus. 



in ATHENS— THE MUSEUMS 59 

has almost exactly the same treatment of the cloak on 
the left arm which we see in the celebrated Hermes of 
the Vatican, 1 the proportions of the figure are nearer 
the celebrated Discobolus (numbered 126, Braccio 
Nuovo). There are two other copies at Florence, 
and one at Naples. These repetitions point to some 
very celebrated original, which the critics consider to 
be of the older school of Polycleitus, and even imagine 
may possibly be a copy of his Doryphorus, which was 
called the Canon statue, or model of the perfect manly 
form. The Hermes has too strong a likeness to 
Lysippus's Apoxyomenos not to be recognised as of the 
newer school. What we have, then, in this Attic 
statue seems an intermediate type between the earlier 
and stronger school of Polycleitus and the more elegant 
and newer school of Lysippus in Alexander's day. 

There can, however, be no doubt that it does not 
date from the older and severer age of sculpture, of 
which Pheidias and Polycleitus were the highest repre- 
sentatives. Any one who studies Greek art perceives 
how remarkably not only the style of dress and orna- 
ment, but even the proportions of the figure change, 
as we come down from generation to generation in the 
long line of Greek sculptors. The friezes of Selinus 
(now at Palermo), and those of iEgina (now in 
Munich), which are among our earliest classical speci- 
mens, are remarkable for short, thick-set forms. The 
men are men five feet seven, or, at most, eight inches 
high, and their figures are squat even for that height. 
In the specimens we have of the days of Pheidias and 
Polycleitus these proportions are altered. The head 
of the Doryphorus, if we can depend upon our supposed 
copies, is still heavy, and the figure bulky, though 
taller in proportion. He looks a man of five feet ten 

1 No. 53, Mu8. Pio Clem., in a small room beside the Apollo Bclvedert 
and Laocodn. 



60 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

inches at least. The statue we are just considering is 
even taller, and is like the copies we have of Lysippus's 
work, the figure apparently of a man of six feet high ; 
but his head is not so small, nor is he so slender and 
light as this type is usually found. 

It is not very easy to give a full account of this 
change. There is, of course, one general reason well 
known — the art of the Greeks, like almost all such 
developments, went through stiffness and clumsiness 
into dignity and strength, to which it presently added 
that grace which raises strength into majesty. But in 
time the seeking after grace becomes too prominent, 
and so strength, and with it the majesty which requires 
strength as well as grace, is gradually lost. Thus we 
arrive at a period when the forms are merely elegant 
or voluptuous, without any assertion of power. I will 
speak of a similar development among female figures in 
connection with another subject. 

This can only be made plain by a series of illustra- 
tions. Of course, the difficulty of obtaining really 
archaic statues was very great. 1 They were mostly 
sacred images of the gods, esteemed venerable and 
interesting by the Greeks, but seldom copied. Happily, 
the Romans, when they set themselves to admire and 
procure Greek statues, had fits of what we now call 
pre-Raphaelitism — fits of admiration for the archaic 
and devout, even if ungraceful, in preference to the 
more perfect forms of later art. Hence, we find in 
Italy a number of statues which, if not really archaic, 
are at least archaistic^ as the critics call it — imitations 
or copies of archaic statues. With these we need now 
no longer be content. And we may pause a moment 
on the question of archaic Greek art, because, apart 
from the imitations of the time of Augustus and 

1 Excellent photographs of every archaic figure at Athens are now easily 
attainable. 



in ATHENS— THE MUSEUMS 61 

Hadrian, we had already some really genuine frag- 
ments in the little museum in the Acropolis — frag- 
ments saved, not from the present Parthenon, but 
rather from about the ruins of the older Parthenon. 
This temple was destroyed by the Persians, and the 
materials were built into the surrounding wall or used 
to make a larger platform by the Athenians, when 
they began to strengthen and beautify the Acropolis 
at the opening of their career of dominion and wealth. 
The stains of fire are said to be still visible on these 
drums of pillars now built into the fortification, and 
there can be no doubt of their belonging to the old 
temple, as it is well attested. 1 But I do not agree 
with the statement that these older materials were so 
used in order to nurse a perpetual hatred against the 
Persians in the minds of the people, who saw daily 
before them the evidence of the ancient wrong done 
to their temples. 2 I believe this sentimental twaddle 
to be quite foreign to all Greek feeling. The materials 
were used in the wall because they were unsuitable for 
the newer temples, and because they must otherwise 
be greatly in the way on the limited surface of the 
Acropolis. 

A fair specimen of the old sculptures first found is 
a very stiff", and, to us, comical figure, which has lost 
its legs, but is otherwise fairly preserved, and which 
depicts a male personage with curious conventional 

1 I endeavoured to examine these drums by looking down through a 
hole in the wall over them. They seemed to me not fluted, and rather 
of the shape of barrels, very thick in the middle, than of the drums of 
pillars in temples. 

2 It is asserted somewhere by a Greek author that the temples burned 
by the Persians were left in ruins to remind the people of the wrongs of 
the hated barbarians. But we have distinct evidence, in some cases, that 
this assertion is not true, and besides, using the materials for other pur- 
poses is not the same thing. We now know that a quantity of mutilated 
statues were shot as rubbish into the space between the old Parthenon 
and the wall, to make a terrace for the newer and greater building. Here 
they were found in the recent excavations. 



62 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

hair, and still more conventional beard, holding by its 
four legs a bull or calf, which he is carrying on his 
shoulders. The eyes are now hollow, and were evidently 
once filled with something different from the marble of 
which the statue is made. The whole pose and style 
of the work is stiff and expressionless, and it is one of 
the most characteristic remains of the older Attic art. 

Happily there is little doubt what the statue means. 
It is the votive offering of the Marathonians, which 
Pausanias saw in the Acropolis, and which commemo- 
rated the legend of Theseus having brought the wild 
bull, sent against them by Minos, from Marathon to 
the Acropolis, where he sacrificed it. Pausanias does 
not say how Theseus was represented with the bull ; 
but it certainly was not a group — such a thing is 
clearly beyond the narrow and timid conceptions of 
the artists of that day. It being difficult to represent 
this hero and bull together except by representing the 
man carrying the bull, the artist has made the animal 
full grown in type, but as small as a calf, and has, of 
course, not attempted any expression of hostility 
between the two. The peaceful look, which merely 
arises from the inability of the artist to render expres- 
sion, had led many good art critics to call it not a 
Theseus but a Hermes. Such being the history of 
the statue, it is not difficult to note its characteristics. 
We see the conventional treatment of the hair, the 
curious transparent garments lying close to the skin, 
and the very heavy muscular forms of the arms and 
body. The whole figure is stiff and expressionless, and 
strictly in what is called the hieratic or old religious 
style, as opposed to an ideal or artistic conception. 

There are two full-length reliefs — one which I first 
saw in a little church near Orchomenus, and a couple 
more at Athens in the Theseon — which are plainly of 
the same epoch and style of art. The most complete 



in ATHENS— THE MUSEUMS 63 

Athenian one is inscribed as the stele of Aristion, and 
as the work of Aristocles, 1 doubtless an artist known 
as contemporary with those who fought at the battle 
of Marathon. Thus we obtain a very good clue to 
the date at which this art flourished. There is also 
the relief of a head of a similar figure, with the hair 
long, and fastened in a knot behind, and with a discus 
raised above the shoulder, so as to look like a nimbus 
round the head, which is one of the most interesting 
objects in the collection. But of the rest the pedestal 
only is preserved. Any impartial observer will see in 
these figures strong traces of the influence of Asiatic 
style. This influence seems about as certain, and 
almost as much disputed, as the Egyptian influences 
on the Doric style of architecture. To an unbiassed 
observer these influences speak so plainly, that, in the 
absence of strict demonstration to the contrary, one 
feels bound to admit them — the more so, as we know 
that the Greeks, like all other people of genius, were 
ever ready and anxious to borrow from others. It 
should be often repeated, because it is usually ignored, 
that it is a most original gift to know how to borrow ; 
and that those only who feel wanting in originality are 
anxious to assert it. Thus the Romans, who borrowed 
without assimilating, are always asserting their origin- 
ality ; the Greeks, who borrowed more and better, 
because they made what they borrowed their own, 
never care to do so. The hackneyed parallel of 
Shakespeare will occur to all. 

Unfortunately, the museums of Athens show us 
but few examples of the transition state of art be- 
tween this and the perfect work of Pheidias's school. 2 
The iEginetan marbles are less developed than 

1 Aristion is also mentioned among the artists of the period. 
a I shall speak of the bronze charioteer at Delphi in my chapter 
(X.) on that place. 



64 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Pheidias's work j but from the relief of Aristion, and 
the Theseus of the Acropolis, to these, is a wide gulf 
in artistic feeling. The former is the work of children 
shackled by their material, still more by conventional 
rules ; the latter the work of men. There is also the 
well-known Apollo of Thera ; a similar Apollo found 
at Athens, with very conventional curls, and now in 
the National Museum ; and two or three small sitting 
statues of Athene which, though very archaic, begin 
to approach the grace of artistic sculpture. But Italy 
is sufficiently rich in imitations of this very period. 
There are four very remarkable statues of this kind in 
a small room of the Villa Albani, near Rome. We 
have also among the bronzes found at Pompeii statues 
precisely of this style, evidently copies from old 
Greek originals, and made to satisfy the pre-Raphael- 
itism (as I have already called it) of Italian amateurs. 
The general features of the old Greek face in monu- 
ments were a retreating forehead, a peaked nose, 
slightly turned up at the end, the mouth drawn in, 
and the corners turned up, flat elongated eyes (especially 
full in the profiles of reliefs), a prominent angular 
chin, lank cheeks, and high ears. These lovely 
features can be found on hundreds of vases, because, 
vase-making being rather a trade than an art, men 
kept close to the old models long after great sculptors 
and painters had, like Polygnotus, begun to depart 
from the antique stiffness of the countenance. 1 The 
pose of the arms is stiff, and the attitude that of 
stepping forward, which is very usual in archaic 
figures — I suppose because it enlarged the base of the 
statue, and made it stand more firmly in its place. 
The absence of any girdle or delaying fold in the 
garments is one of the most marked contrasts with 
the later draping of such figures. 

1 * Vultum ab antiquo rigore variare.' — Plin. xxxv. 35. 



in ATHENS— THE MUSEUMS 65 

But now at last we can show the reader how far 
the antiquaries of later days were able to imitate 
archaic sculpture. There are seventeen statues found 
in 1885-86 on the Acropolis, 1 where they had been 
piled together with portions of pillars and other stones 
to extend the platform for new buildings. The style 
and the mutilation of all these statues, which are 
most probably votive offerings, 2 point to their being 
the actual statues which the Persians overthrew when 
ravaging the Acropolis (480 B.C.). They were so 
broken and spoilt that the Athenians, when restoring 
and rebuilding their temples, determined to use them 
for rubbish. Thus we have now a perfectly authentic 
group of works showing us the art of the older 
Athens before the Persian Wars. They are each made 
of several pieces of marble, apparently Parian, dowelled 
together like wooden work, and some have a bronze 
pin protruding from the head, apparently to hold 
a nimbus or covering of metal. They were all richly 
coloured, as many traces upon them still show. 8 

1 They have been published in the first part of an excellent work on 
the treasures of Athens, reproduced in phototype by Rhomai'des Brothers, 
with an explanatory text by various Athenian scholars. 

2 It now appears from an inscription that the parents of young girls 
chosen for solemn duties in the service of the goddess were allowed to 
set up portrait statues of them on the Acropolis. 

* I cannot do better than quote the admirable description of M. 
Ch. Diehl : ' C'etaient surtout de nouvelles statues de jeunes femmes, au 
my3t6rieux sourire, a la parure etincelante, de ces idoles fardees et peintes, 
bien faites, par leur saveur etrange, pour tenter le pinceau d'un Gustave 
Moreau ou la plume d'un Pierre Loti. Comme leurs sceurs, ces nouvelles 
venues ont la meme attitude et le m&me costume, les memes coquetteries 
de parure, le meme soin de leur chevelure, la m&me expression aussi j 
pourtant a la serie deja connue elles ont ajoute quelques ceuvres exquises, 
et trois d'entre elles en particulier meritent d'etre signalees. L'une est 
une merveille de coloris ; sa tunique a large bande rouge, sa chemisette 
d'un vert fonce, bordee de pourpre, son manteau orne de meandres 
du dessin le plus fin, ses vetements parsemes de croix rouges ou 
vcrtes, qui se retrouvent sur le diademe de ses cheveux, sont d'un incom- 
parable eclat. Sous les tons chauds de ces riches couleurs disposees 

F 



66 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

Let us now leave this archaic art and go to the 
street of tombs, where we can find some specimens 
of rare merit, and in such condition as to be easily 
intelligible. A good many of these reliefs have been 
removed to the national Museum, where they are no 
doubt safer, and more easily studied and compared, 
though there is something lost in not having them 
upon their original site, with some at least of their 
original surroundings. What I have said of the 
museums is, even so, disappointing, as indeed it should 
be, if the reelings of the visitor are to be faithfully 
reproduced. But I must not fail to add, before turning 
to other places, that in inscriptions these museums are 
very rich, as well as also in Attic vases, and lamps, and 
other articles of great importance in our estimate of 
old Greek life. The professors of the University have 
been particularly diligent in deciphering and explaining 

avec un gout exquis, il semble que le marbre s'anime et fasse la chair 
vivante ; et un charme dtrange emane de cette figure. Celle-ci d'une 
date plus recente, probablement l'une des plus jeunes de la s6rie, montre 
1' effort d'un artiste habile pour creer une oeuvre originale. Dans ces 
formes elancees, dans cette tete petite et fine, dans ces bras jet£s en 
avant du corps, on sent la volonte du maitre qui cherche a faire 
autrement que ses devanciers ; le sourire traditionnel est devenu 
presque imperceptible, les yeux, qui souriaient jadis a l'unison des 
levres, ont cess6 de se relever vers les tempes ; les joues creuses se 
remplissent et s'arrondissent $ avec des ceuvres de cette sorte, l'archai'sme 
est pret a finir. ... La troisieme enfin est une des ceuvres les plus 
remarquables de l'art attique. Plus ancienne que la precedente, elle est 
d'une valeur artistique bien superieure. Le modele en est exquis, et 
son irr6prochable finesse fait un contraste singulier avec les procedes 
qui sentent encore les conventions de l'ecole. Suivant les traditions de 
l'art antique, les yeux sont obliques et brides, le sourire fait toujours 
grimacer les levres ; mais dans les yeux le regard n'est plus indifferent et 
fixe j il brille d'une lueur de vie et de pensee ; le sourire de ces levres 
n'est plus sec et dur, il semble avoir une douceur attendrie. Certes il 
n'y a dans cette sculpture nul effort pour chercher des chemins nouveaux j 
mais parmi les ceuvres de l'art archaique, parmi celles ou le maitre a 
docilement suivi la route frayee et battue, cette sculpture a l'expression 
candide et presque attristee est l'une des plus admirables.' — Excursions 
archeologiques en Grice, p. 1 04. 



in ATHENS— THE TOMBS 67 

the inscriptions, and with the aid of the Germans 
(especially of Professor Wilhelm), who have collected, 
and are still collecting, these scattered documents in 
a complete publication, we are daily having new light 
thrown upon Greek history. Thus Kohler was able 
from the recovered Attic tribute -lists to construct 
a map of the Athenian maritime empire with its 
dependencies, which tells the student more in five 
minutes than hours of laborious reading. The study 
of vases and lamps is beyond my present scope ; and 
the former so wide and complicated a subject, that it 
cannot be mastered without long study and trouble. 

I pass, therefore, from the museums to the street of 
tombs, which Thucydides tells us to find in the 
fairest suburb of the city, as we go out westward 
towards the groves of Academe, and before we turn 
slightly to the south on our way to the Peiraeus. 
Thucydides has described the funeral ceremonies held 
in this famous place, and has composed for us a 
funeral oration, which he has put in the mouth of 
Pericles. 1 It is with this oration, probably the best- 
known passage in Thucydides's great history, in our 
minds, that we approach the avenue where the 
Athenians laid their dead. We have to pass through 
the poorest portion of modern Athens, through 
wretched bazaars and dirty markets, which abut upon 
the main street. Amid all this squalor and poverty, 
all this complete denial of art and leisure, there are 

1 These panegyrics — \6yoi kiriTatyioi they were called — were a 
favourite exercise of Greek literary men. There are five classical ones 
still extant — that mentioned, that in the Menexenus of Plato, that of 
Hypereides, and those ascribed (justly) to Lysias and (falsely) to 
Demosthenes. That of Hypereides, very mutilated as it is, seems to 
me the finest next to that of Thucydides. But they are all built upon 
the same lines, showing even here that strict conservatism in every 
branch of Greek art which never varied, for variety's sake, from a type 
once recognised as really good. 



68 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

still features which faintly echo old Greek life. 
There is the bright colour of the dresses — the 
predominance of white, and red, and blue, of which 
the old Athenians were so fond j and there is among 
the poorest classes a great deal of that striking 
beauty which recalls to us the old statues. More 
especially in the form of the head, and in the 
expression, of the children, we see types not easily to 
be found elsewhere in Europe, and which, if not 
derived from classical Greece, are at all events very 
beautiful. 

We then come on to a railway station, which is, 
indeed, in this place, as elsewhere, very offensive. 
With its grimy smoke, its shrill sounds, and all its 
other hard unloveliness, it is not a meet neighbour 
for the tombs of the old Greeks, which are close to it 
on all sides. 

They lie — as almost all old ruins do— far below 
the present level of the ground, and have, therefore, 
to be exhumed by careful digging. When this had 
been done they were covered with a rude door, to 
protect their sculptured face ; and when I first saw 
them were standing about, without any order or 
regularity, close to the spots where they had been 
found. 

A proper estimate of these tombs cannot be 
attained without appreciating the feelings with which 
the survivors set them up. And we must consider 
not only the general attitude of Greek literature on 
the all-important question of the state of man after 
death, but also the thousands of inscriptions upon 
tombs, both with and without sculptured reliefs, if we 
will form a clear opinion about the feelings of the 
bereaved in these bygone days. 

We know from Homer and from Mimnermus 
that in the earlier periods, though the Greeks were 



in ATHENS— THE TOMBS 69 

unable to shake off a belief in existence after death, 
they could not conceive that state as anything but 
a shadowy and wretched echo of the real life upon 
earth. It was a gloomy afterlude, burdened with the 
memory of lost happiness and the longing for lost 
enjoyment. To the Homeric Greeks death was 
a dark unavoidable fate, without hope and without 
reward. It is, indeed, true that we find in Pindar 
thoughts and aspirations of a very different kind. 
We have in the fragments of his poetry more than 
one passage asserting the rewards of the just, and the 
splendours of a future life far happier than that which 
we now enjoy. But, notwithstanding these noble 
visions, such high expectation laid no large hold upon 
the imagination of the Greek world. The poems of 
Pindar, we are told, soon ceased to be popular, and 
his visions are but a streak of light amid general 
gloom. The kingdom of the dead in iEschylus is 
evidently, as in Homer, but a weary echo of this life, 
where honour can only be attained by the pious 
service of loving kinsfolk, whose duty paid to the 
dead affects him in his gloomier state, and raises 
him in the esteem of his less-remembered fellows. 
Sophocles says nothing to clear away the night ; nay 
rather his deepest and maturest contemplation regards 
death as the worst of ills to the happy man — a sorry 
refuge to the miserable. Euripides longs that there 
may be no future state ; and Plato only secures the 
immortality of the soul by severing it from the 
person — the man, and all his interests. 

It is plain, from this evidence, that the Greeks 
must have looked upon the death of those they loved 
with unmixed sorrow. It was the final parting, when 
all the good and pleasant things are remembered j 
when men seek, as it were, to increase the pang, by 
clothing the dead in all his sweetest and dearest 



70 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

presence. But this was not done by pompous in- 
scriptions, or by a vain enumeration of all the 
deceased had performed — inscriptions which, among 
us, tell more of the vanity than of the grief of the 
survivors. The commonest epitaph was a simple 
Xcupe, or farewell ; and it is this single word, so full 
and deep in its meaning to those who love, which is 
pictured in the tomb reliefs. They are simple parting 
scenes, expressing the grief of the survivors, and the 
great sadness of the sufferer, who is to be left in his 
long home. 

Nevertheless, what strikes us forcibly in these 
remarkable monuments is the chastened expression of 
sorrow which they display. There is no violence, no 
despair, no extravagance — all is simple and noble ; 
thus combining purity of art with a far deeper pathos 
— a far nobler grief — than that of the exaggerated 
paintings and sculptures which seek to express mourn- 
ing in later and less cultivated ages. 1 We may defy 
any art to produce truer or more poignant pictures or 
real sorrow — a sorrow, as I have explained, far deeper 
and more hopeless than any Christian sorrow j and 
yet there is no wringing of hands, no swooning, no 
defacing with sackcloth and ashes. 2 Sometimes, 
indeed, as in the celebrated tomb of Dexileos, a mere 
portrait of the dead in active life was put upon his 
tomb, and private grief would not assert itself in 
presence of the record of his public services. 

i Roubillac's monuments in Westminster Abbey, which excited the 
admiration of his contemporaries, and those in the Staglieno near Genoa, 
are the clearest examples I know of degradation in public taste on this 
question. 

2 I did, indeed, see one relief at Athens, in which the relatives are 
represented as rushing forward in agony, as it were to delay the departure 
of the fainting figure. It is right that this exception should be noted, 
as it shows that they understood what violent grief was, and yet avoided 
representing it. 



in ATHENS— THE TOMBS 71 

I know not that any other remnants of Greek art 
bring home to us more plainly one of its eternal and 
divine features — or shall I rather say, one of its eternal 
and human features ? — the greatest, if not the main 
feature, which has made it the ever new and ever 
lasting lawgiver to men in their efforts to represent 
the ideal. 

If I am to permit myself any digression whatever, 
we cannot do better than conclude this chapter with 
some reflections on the reserve of Greek art — I mean 
the reserve in the displaying of emotion, in the por- 
traying of the fierce outbursts of joy or grief; and 
again, more generally, the reserve in the exhibiting 
of peculiar or personal features, passing interests, or 
momentary emotions. 

In a philosophy now rather forgotten than extinct, 
and which once commanded no small attention, Adam 
Smith was led to analyse the indirect effects of sym- 
pathy^ from which, as a single principle, he desired to 
deduce all the rules of ethics. While straining many 
points unduly, he must be confessed to have explained 
with great justice the origin of good taste or tact in 
ordinary life, which he saw to be the careful watching 
of the interest of others in our own affairs, and the 
feeling that we must not force upon them what 
concerns ourselves, unless we are sure to carry with 
us their active sympathy. Good breeding, he says, 
consists in a delicate perception how far this will go, 
and in suppressing those of our feelings which, though 
they affect us strongly, cannot be expected to affect in 
like manner our neighbour. There can be no doubt 
that whatever other elements come in, this analysis 
is true, so far as it goes. The very same principle 
applies still more strongly and universally in art. As 
tragedy is bound to treat ideal griefs and joys of so 
large and broad a kind that every spectator may merge 



72 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

in them his petty troubles, so sculpture and painting 
are only ideal, so far as they represent those large and 
eternal features in human nature which must always 
command the sympathy of every pure human heart. 

Let us dispose at once of an apparent exception — 
the mediaeval pictures of the Passion of Christ, and 
the sorrows of the Virgin Mary. Here the artist 
allowed himself the most extreme treatment, because 
the objects were necessarily the centre of the very 
highest sympathy. No expression of the grief of 
Christ could be thought exaggerated in the Middle 
Ages, because in this very exaggeration lay the centre 
point of men's religion. But when no such object 
of universal and all-absorbing sympathy can be found 
(and there was none such in pagan life), then the 
Greek artist must attain by his treatment of the 
object what the Christian artist obtained by the 
object itself. Assuming, then, a mastery over his 
material, and sufficient power of execution, the next 
feature to be looked for in Greek art, and especially 
in Greek sculpture, is a certain modesty and reserve 
in expression, which will not portray slight defects in 
picturing a man, but represent that eternal or ideal 
character in him, which remains in our memory when 
he is gone. Such, for example, is the famous portrait- 
statue of Sophocles in the Lateran. 

Such are also all that great series of ideal figures 
which meet us in the galleries of ancient art. They 
seldom show us any violent emotion ; they are seldom 
even in so special an attitude that critics cannot 
interpret it in several different ways, or as suitable 
to several myths. It is not passing states of feeling, 
but the eternal and ideal beauty of human nature, 
which Greek sculpture seeks to represent ; and for 
this reason it has held its sway through all the 
centuries which have since gone by. This was the 



in ATHENS— THE TOMBS 73 

calm art of Pheidias, and Polycleitus, and Polygnotus, 
in sentiment not differing from the rigid awkwardness 
of their predecessors, but attaining, in mastery of pro- 
portions and of difficulties, the grace in which the 
others had failed. To this general law there are, no 
doubt, exceptions, and perhaps very brilliant ones j 
yet they are exceptions, and even in them, if we 
consider them attentively, we can see the universal 
features, and the points of sympathy for all mankind. 
But if the appeal for sympathy is indeed overstrained, 
then, however successful in its own society and its 
own social atmosphere, the work of art loses power 
when offered to another generation. Thus Euripides, 
though justly considered in his own society the most 
tragic of poets, has for this very reason ceased to 
appeal to us as iEschylus still appeals. For iEschylus 
kept within the proper bounds dictated by the reserve 
of art ; Euripides often did not, and his work, though 
great and full of genius, suffered accordingly. 

It seems to me that the tombs before us are remark- 
able as exemplifying this true and perfect reserve. 
They are simple pictures of the grief of parting — of 
the recollection of pleasant days of love and friendship 
— of the gloom of the unknown future. But there is 
no exaggeration, nor speciality — no individuality, I had 
almost said — in the picture. I feel no curiosity to 
inquire who these people are — what were their names 
— even what was the relationship of the deceased. 
For I am perfectly satisfied with an ideal portrait of 
the grief of parting — a grief that comes to us all, and 
lays bitter hold of us at some season of life ; and it is 
this universal sorrow — this great jar in our lives — 
which the Greek artist has brought before us, and 
which calls forth our deepest sympathy. There 
will be future occasion to come back upon this all- 
important feature in connection with the action in 



74 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Greek sculpture, and even with the draping of their 
statues — in all of which the calm and chaste reserve 
of the better Greek art contrasts strangely with the 
Michael Angelos, and Berninis, and Canovas of other 
days; nay, even with the Greek sculpture of a no less 
brilliant but less refined age. 

But, in concluding this digression, I will call 
attention to a modern parallel in the portraiture of 
grief, and of grief at final parting. This parallel 
is not a piece of sculpture, but a poem, perhaps the 
most remarkable poem of the last generation — the In 
Memoriam of Tennyson. Though written from 
personal feeling, and to commemorate a special 
person — Arthur Hallam — whom some of us even 
knew, has this poem laid hold of the imagination of 
men strongly and lastingly owing to the poet's special 
loss ? Certainly not. I do not even think that this 
great dirge — this magnificent funeral poem — has 
excited in most of us any strong interest in Arthur 
Hallam. In fact, any other friend of the poet's 
would have suited the general reader equally well as 
the exciting cause of a poem, which we delight in, 
because it puts into great words the ever-recurring 
and permanent features in such grief — those dark 
longings about the future ; those suggestions of 
despair, of discontent with the providence of the 
world, of wild speculation about its laws ; those 
struggles to reconcile our own loss, and that of the 
human race, with some larger law of wisdom and 
of benevolence. To the poet, of course, his own 
particular friend was the great centre point of the 
whole. But to us, in reading it, there is a wide 
distinction between the personal passages — I mean 
those which give family details, and special circum- 
stances in Hallam's life, or his intimacy with the 
poet — and the purely poetical or artistic stanzas, 



in ATHENS— THE TOMBS 75 

which soar away into a region far above all special 
detail, and sing of the great gloom which hangs over 
the future, and of the vehement beating of the human 
soul against the bars of its prison-house, when one 
is taken, and another left, not merely at apparent 
random, but with apparent injustice and damage to 
mankind. Hence, every man in grief for a lost friend 
will read this poem to his great comfort, and will then 
only see clearly what it means ; and he will find it 
speak to him specially and particularly, not in its per- 
sonal passages, but in its general features ; in its hard 
metaphysics ; in its mystical theology ; in its angry 
and uncertain ethics. For even the commonest mind 
is forced by grief out of its vulgarity, and attacks 
the world-problems, which at other times it has no 
power or taste to approach. 

By this illustration, then, the distinction between 
the universal and the personal features of grief can 
be clearly seen ; and the reader will admit that, 
though it would be most unreasonable to dictate to 
the poet, or to imagine that he should have omitted 
the stanzas which refer specially to his friend, and 
which were to him of vital importance, yet to us it is 
no loss to forget that name and those circumstances, 
and hold fast to the really eternal (and because eternal, 
really artistic) features, in that very noble symphony 
— shall I say of half-resolved discords, or of suspended 
harmonies, which faith may reconcile, but which 
reason can hardly analyse or understand ? l 

Within a few minutes' walk of these splendid 
records of the dead, the traveller who returns to the 
town across the Observatory Hill will find a very 
different cemetery. For here he suddenly comes up 

1 In the Adonais, Shelley affords a curious contrast to the somewhat 
morbid prominence of the poet in the case before us. The self-efface- 
ment of Shelley has centred all our interest on his lost friend. 



j6 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

to a long cleft in the rock, running parallel with the 
road below, and therefore quite invisible from it. 
The rising ground towards the city hides it equally 
from the Acropolis, and accordingly from all Athens. 
This gorge, some two hundred yards long, sixty wide, 
and over thirty feet deep, is the notorious Barathrum^ 
the place of execution in old days ; the place where 
criminals were cast out, and where the public execu- 
tioner resided. It has been falsely inferred by the old 
scholiasts that the Athenians cast men alive into the 
pit. It is not nearly deep enough now to cause death 
in this way, and there seems no reason why its 
original depth should have been diminished by any 
accumulation of rubbish, such as is common on in- 
habited sites. c Casting into the Barathrum ' referred 
rather to the refusing the rights of burial to executed 
criminals — an additional disgrace, and to the Greeks a 
grave additional penalty. Honour among the dead 
was held to follow in exact proportion to the con- 
tinued honours paid by surviving friends. 

Here, then, out of view of all the temples and 
hallowed sites of the city, dwelt the public slave, with 
his instruments of death, perhaps in a cave or grotto, 
still to be seen in the higher wall of the gorge, and 
situated close to the point where an old path leads 
over the hill towards the city. Plato speaks of young 
men turning aside, as they came from Peirasus, to see 
the dead lying in charge of this official; and there 
must have been times in the older history of Athens 
when this cleft in the rock was a place of carnage and 
of horror. The gentler law of later days seems to 
have felt it an outrage on human feeling, and instead 
of casting the dead into this gorge, it was merely 
added to the sentence that the body should not be 
buried within the boundaries of Attica. Yet, though 
the Barathrum may have been no longer used, the 



in ATHENS— THE BARATHRUM 77 

accursed gate (lepa TrvXrj) still led to it from the city, 
and the old associations clung about its gloomy 
seclusion. Even in the last century, the Turks, 
whether from instinct, or led by old tradition, still 
used it as a place of execution. 

In the present day, all traces of this hideous history 
have long passed away, and I found a little field of 
corn waving upon the level ground beneath, which 
had once been the Aceldama of Athens. But even 
now there seemed a certain loneliness and weirdness 
about the place — silent and deserted in the midst of 
thoroughfares, hidden from the haunts of men, and 
hiding them from view by its massive walls. Nay, as 
if to bring back the dark memories of the past, great 
blood-red poppies stained the ground in patches as it 
were with slaughter, and hawks and ravens were still 
circling about overhead, as their ancestors did in the 
days of death ; attached, I suppose, by hereditary 
instinct to this fatal place, c for where the carcase is, 
there shall the eagles be gathered together.' 



CHAPTER IV 

THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS 

I suppose there can be no doubt whatever that the 
ruins on the Acropolis of Athens are the most remark- 
able in the world. There are ruins far larger, such as 
the Pyramids, and the remains of Karnak. There are 
ruins far more perfectly preserved, such as the great 
Temple at Paestum. There are ruins more picturesque, 
such as the ivy-clad walls of mediaeval abbeys beside 
the rivers in the rich valleys of England. But there 
is no ruin, all the world over, which combines so 
much striking beauty, so distinct a type, so vast a 
volume of history, so great a pageant of immortal 
memories. There is, in fact, no building on earth 
which can sustain the burden of such greatness, and 
so the first visit to the Acropolis is and must be dis- 
appointing. When the traveller reflects how all the 
Old World's culture culminated in Greece — all 
Greece in Athens — all Athens in its Acropolis — all 
the Acropolis in the Parthenon — so much crowds 
upon the mind confusedly that we look for some 
enduring monument whereupon we can fasten our 
thoughts, and from which we can pass as from a 
visible starting-point into all this history and all this 
greatness. And at first we look in vain. The 
shattered pillars and the torn pediments will not bear 
so great a strain : and the traveller feels forced to 

78 



chap, iv ATHENS— THE ACROPOLIS 79 

admit a sense of disappointment, sore against his wiL 
He has come a tedious journey into the remoter parts 
of Europe ; he has reached at last what his soul for 
many years had longed to behold : and as is wont to 
be the case with all great human longings, the truth 
does not fulfil his desire. The pang of disappoint- 
ment is all the greater when he sees that the tooth of 
time and the shock of earthquake have done but little 
harm. It is the hand of man — of reckless foe and 
ruthless lover — which has robbed him of his hope. 
This is the feeling, I am sure, of more than have con- 
fessed it, when they first wound their way through 
the fields of great blue aloes, and passed up through 
the Propylaea into the presence of the Parthenon. 
But to those who have not given way to these feel- 
ings — who have gone again and again and sat upon 
the rock, and watched the ruins at every hour of the 
day, and in the brightness of a moonlight night — to 
those who have dwelt among them, and meditated 
upon them with love and awe — there first come back 
the remembered glories of Athens's greatness, when 
Olympian Pericles stood upon this rock with care- 
worn Pheidias,and reckless Alcibiades with pious Nicias, 
and fervent Demosthenes with caustic Phocion — when 
such men peopled the temples in their worship, and 
all the fluted pillars and sculptured friezes were bright 
with scarlet, and blue, and gold. And then the glory 
of remembered history casts its hue over the war- 
stained remnants. Every touch of human hand, 
every fluting, and drop, and triglyph, and cornice 
recalls the master minds which produced this splen- 
dour; and so at last we tear ourselves from it as from 
a thing of beauty, which even now we can never 
know, and love, and meditate upon to our hearts' 
content. 

Nothing is more vexatious than the reflection, how 



80 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

lately these splendid remains have been reduced to 
their present state. The Parthenon, being used as a 
Greek church, remained untouched and perfect all 
through the Middle Ages. Then it became a 
mosque, and the Erechtheum a seraglio, and in this 
way survived with comparatively little damage till 
1687, when, in the bombardment by the Venetians 
under Morosini, a shell dropped into the Parthenon, 
where the Turks had their powder stored, and blew 
out the whole centre of the building. Eight or nine 
pillars at each side have been thrown down, and have 
left a large gap, which so severs the front and rear of 
the temple, that from the city below they look like 
the remains of two different buildings. The great 
drums of these pillars are yet lying there, in their 
order, just as they fell, and some money and care 
might set them up again in their places } yet there is 
not in Greece the patriotism or trje zeal to enrich the 
country by this restoration, matchless in its certainty 
as well as in its splendour. 

But the Venetians were not content with their 
exploit. They were, about this time, when they held 
possession of most of Greece, emulating the Pisan 
taste for Greek sculptures ; and the four fine lions 
standing at the gate of the arsenal in Venice still 
testify to their zeal in carrying home Greek trophies 
to adorn their capital. Morosini wished to take down 
the sculptures of Pheidias from the eastern pediment, 
but his workmen attempted it so clumsily that the 
figures fell from their place, and were dashed to pieces 
on the ground. The Italians also left their lasting 
mark on the place by building a high square tower of 
wretched patched masonry at the right side of the 
entrance gate, which had of late years become such 
an eyesore to the better-educated public, that when I 
was first at Athens there was a subscription on foot 



iv ATHENS— THE ACROPOLIS 81 

to have it taken down — not only in order to remove 
an obtrusive reminiscence of the invaders, but in the 
hope of bringing to light some pillars of the Propylaea 
built into it, as well as many inscribed stones, broken 
off and carried away from their places as building 
material. This expectation has not been verified by 
the results. The tower was taken down by the 
liberality of H. Schliemann, and there were hardly 
any inscriptions or sculptures discovered. 

The late Prof. Freeman, in the Saturday Review 
(No. 1 134), attacks this removal of the Venetian 
tower, and my approval of it, as a piece of ignorant 
and barbarous pedantry, which from love of the old 
Greek work, and its sanctity, desired to destroy the 
later history of the place, and efface the monuments of 
its fortunes in after ages. 1 He thought that even the 
Turkish additions to the Parthenon should have been 
left untouched, so that the student of to-day could 
meditate upon all these incongruities, and draw from 
them historical lessons. And, assuredly, of all lessons 
conveyed, that of a victory over the Turks would have 
been to that writer the most important and the most 
delightful. 

If this great pedant had condescended to let us 
argue with him, we should have suggested that there 
are, no doubt, cases where the interests of art and of 
history are conflicting, and where a restoration of 
pristine beauty must take away from the evidences of 
later history. The real question is, then, whether the 
gain in art is greater than the loss in history. In the 
case of the Parthenon I think it was, now especially, 

1 He also supposed that the tower was Frankish, and built long before 
the Venetian conquest. But here he was wrong. The stones inside the 
tower, when taken down, showed clear traces of gunpowder, as was 
published in a learned refutation of his views, printed at Athens. Yet 
he reprinted hit original criticism without confessing that he had been 
mistaken. 



82 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

when records and drawings of the inferior addi- 
tions could be secured. It may be historically 
important to note the special work and character of 
every generation of men ; but surely for the education 
of the human race in the laws of beauty, and in 
general culture, some ages are worth nothing, and 
others worth everything ; and I will not admit that 
this sort of education is one whit less important than 
education in the facts of history. 

Of course, artistic restorations are often carried too 
far ; a certain age may be arbitrarily assumed as the 
canon of perfection, and everything else destroyed to 
make way for it. 1 There are few ages which can lay 
claim to such pre-eminence as the age of Pericles ; yet 
even in this case, were the mediaeval additions really 
beautiful, we should, of course, hesitate to disturb 
them. But the Venetian tower, though a picturesque 
addition to the rock when seen from a distance — so 
much so that I felt its loss when I saw the Acropolis 
again, — had no claim to architectural beauty ; it was 
set up in a place sacred to greater associations, and 
besides there was every reasonable prospect that its 
removal would subserve historical ends of far more 
importance than the Venetian occupation of the 
Acropolis. A few inscriptions of the date of Pericles, 
containing treaties or other such public matter, would, 
in my opinion, have perfectly justified its removal, 
even though it did signify a victory of Christians over 
Turks. 

In any case, it seems unfair that if every generation 
is to express its knowledge by material results, we 
should not be permitted to record our conviction that 
old Greek art or old Greek history is far greater and 
nobler than either Turkish or Venetian history, and 

1 This was said to have been the crime ot the late Sir Gilbert Scott in 
his treatment of old English churches. 



iv ATHENS— THE ACROPOLIS 83 

to testify this opinion by making their monuments 
give way to it. This is the mark of our generation 
on the earth. Thus the eighteenth century was, no 
doubt, a most important time in the history even of 
art, but where noble thirteenth-century churches have 
been dressed up and loaded with eighteenth-century 
additions, I cannot think the historical value of these 
additions, as evidence of the taste or the history of 
their age, counterbalances their artistic mischievous- 
ness, and I sympathise with the nations who take 
them away. Of course, this principle may be over- 
driven, and has been often abused. Against such 
abuses the remarks of the critic to whom I refer are a 
very salutary protest. But that any barbarous or 
unsightly deforming of great artistic monuments is to 
be protected on historical grounds — this is a principle 
of which neither his genius nor his sneers could ever 
convince me.. As for the charge of pedantry, no 
charge is more easily made, but no charge is more 
easily retorted. 

Strangely enough, his theory of the absolute 
sanctity of old brick and mortar nearly agrees in 
results with the absolute carelessness about such things, 
which is the peculiarity of his special enemies, the 
Turks. The Turks, according to Dodwell, who is 
a most trustworthy witness, never destroyed the old 
buildings unless they wanted them for new masonry. 
He tells us not to believe that the figures of the 
remaining pediment were used as targets by the 
Turkish soldiers — a statement often made in his day. 
However that may be, I have little doubt, from what 
I saw myself, that Greek soldiers in the present day 
might so use them. But the Turks did take down 
some pillars of the Propylaea while Dodwell was there, 
for building purposes, an occurrence which gave that 
excellent observer the opportunity of noting the old 



84 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap, 

Greek way of fitting the drums of the pillars together. 
He even got into his possession one of the pieces of 
cypress wood used as plugs between the stone masses, 
ana has given a drawing of it, and explained the 
method of its use, in his admirable book. 1 

But the same traveller was also present when a far 
more determined and systematic attack was made upon 
the remaining ruins of the Parthenon. While he was 
travelling in the interior, Lord Elgin had obtained his 
famous firman from the Sultan to take down and 
remove any antiquities or sculptured stones he might 
require, and the infuriated Dodwell saw a set of 
ignorant workmen, under equally ignorant overseers, 
let loose upon the splendid ruins of the age of Pericles. 
He speaks with much good sense and feeling of this 
proceeding. He is fully aware that the world would 
derive inestimable benefit from the transplanting of 
these splendid fragments to a more accessible place, 
but he cannot find language strong enough to express 
his disgust at the way in which the thing was done. 
Incredible as it may appear, Lord Elgin himself seems 
not to have superintended the work, but to have left 
it to paid contractors, who undertook the job for a 
fixed sum. Little as either Turks or Greeks cared 
for the ruins, Dodwell says that a pang of grief was 
felt through all Athens at the desecration, and that 
the contractors were obliged to bribe workmen with 
additional wages to undertake the ungrateful task. 
He will not even mention Lord Elgin by name, but 
speaks of him with disgust as ' the person ' who 
defaced the Parthenon. He believes that had this 
person been at Athens himself, his underlings could 
hardly have behaved in the reckless way they did, 
pulling down more than they wanted, and taking no 

1 Other specimens are preserved in the museum on the Acropolis, and 
should be noted by the visitor, who may easily pass them by. 



ir ATHENS— THE ACROPOLIS 85 

care to prop up and save the work from which they 
had taken the supports. 

He especially notices their scandalous proceeding 
upon taking up one of the great white marble blocks 
which form the floor or stylobate of the temple. 
They wanted to see what was underneath, and Dod- 
well, who was there, saw the foundation — a substruc- 
ture of Peiraeic sandstone. But when they had finished 
their inspection they actually left the block they had 
removed, without putting it back into its place. So 
this beautiful pavement, made merely of closely-fitting 
blocks, without any artificial or foreign joinings, was 
ripped up, and the work of its destruction begun. I 
am happy to add that, though a considerable rent was 
then made, most of it is still intact, and the traveller 
of to-day may still walk on the very stones which bore 
the tread of every great Athenian. 

The question has often been discussed, whether 
Lord Elgin was justified in carrying off this pedi- 
ment, the metopes, and the friezes, from their place ; 
and the Greeks used to hope that the day would come 
when England would restore these treasures to their 
place. This is, of course, absurd, and it may fairly be 
argued that people who would bombard their antiqui- 
ties in a revolution are not fit custodians of them in 
the intervals of domestic quiet. This was my reply 
to an old Greek gentleman who assailed the memory 
of Lord Elgin with reproaches. I told him that I was 
credibly informed the Greeks had themselves bom- 
barded the Turks in the Acropolis during the war of 
liberation, as several great pieces knocked out and 
starred on the western front testify. He confessed, to 
my amusement, that he had himself been one of the 
assailants, and excused the act by the necessities of 
war. I replied that, as the country seemed then 
(1875) on the verge of a revolution, the sculptures 



86 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

might at least remain in the British Museum until i 
secure government was established. And this is the 
general verdict of reasonable men on the matter. 
They are agreed that it was on the whole a gain to 
science to remove the figures, but all stigmatise as 
barbarous and shameful the reckless way in which the 
work was carried out. 

I confess I approved of this removal until I came 
home from Greece, and went again to see the spoil in 
its place in our great Museum. Though there treated 
with every care — though shown to the best advantage, 
and explained by excellent models of the whole build- 
ing, and clear descriptions of their place on it — not- 
withstanding all this, the loss that these wonderful 
fragments had sustained by being separated from their 
place was so terribly manifest — they looked so un- 
meaning in an English room, away from their temple, 
their country, and their lovely atmosphere — that one 
earnestly wished they had never been taken from their 
place, even at the risk of being made a target by the 
Greeks or the Turks. I am convinced, too, that the 
few who would have seen them, as intelligent travellers, 
on their famous rock, would have gained in quality 
the advantage now diffused among many, but weak- 
ened and almost destroyed by the wrench in associa- 
tions, when the ornament is severed from its surface, 
and the decoration of a temple exhibited apart from 
the temple itself. We may admit, then, that it 
had been better if Lord Elgin had never taken away 
these marbles. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to 
send them back, as has recently been advocated (in 
1890) by some English sentimentalists. But I do 
think that the museum on the Acropolis should be 
provided with a better set of casts of the figures than 
those which are now to be seen there. They look 
very wretched, and carelessly prepared. 



iv ATHENS— THE ACROPOLIS 87 

There are, indeed, preserved in the little museum 
on the Acropolis the broken remains of the figures 
of the eastern pediment, which Morosini and his 
Venetians endeavoured to take down, as I have 
already told. They are little more than pieces of 
drapery, of some use in reconstructing the composi- 
tion, but of none in judging the effect of that famous 
group. 

But we must not yet enter into this little museum, 
which is most properly put out of sight, at the lowest 
or east corner of the rock, and which we do not reach 
till we have passed through all the ruins. As the 
traveller stands at the inner gate of the Propylaea, he 
notices at once all the perfect features of the buildings. 
Over his head are the enormous architrave-stones of 
the Propylaea — blocks of white marble over twenty- 
two feet long, which span the gateway from pillar to 
pillar. Opposite, above him and a little to the right, 
is the mighty Parthenon, not identical in orientation, 
as the architects have observed, with the gateway, 
but varying from it slightly, so that sun and shade 
would play upon it at moments differing from the 
rest, and thus produce a perpetual variety of lights. 
This principle is observed in the setting of the Erech- 
theum also. To the left, and directly over the town, 
stands that beautifully decorated little Ionic temple, 
or combination of temples, with the stately Caryatids 
looking inwards and towards the Parthenon. These 
two buildings are the most perfect examples we have 
of their respective styles. We see at first sight the 
object of the artists who built them. The one is the 
embodiment of majesty, the other of grace. The 
very ornaments of the Parthenon are large and 
massive ; those of the Erechtheum for the most part 
intricate and delicate. Accordingly, the Parthenon 
is in the Doric style, or rather in the Doric style so 



88 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

refined and adorned as to be properly called the Attic 
style. 

For the more we study old Athenian art — nay, 
even old Athenian character generally — the more are 
we convinced that its greatness consists in the com- 
bination of Doric sternness and Ionic grace. It is 
hardly a mediation between them ; it is the adoption 
of the finer elements of both, and the union of them 
into a higher harmony. The most obvious illustra- 
tion of this is the drama, where the Ionic element of 
recitation and the Doric choral hymn were combined 
— and let me observe that the Ionic element was more 
modified than the Doric. In the same way Attic 
architecture used the strength and majesty of the 
older style which we see at Corinth and Paestum ; 
but relieved it, partly by lighter proportions, partly 
by rich decorations, which gave the nearer observer 
an additional and different delight, while from afar the 
large features were of the old Doric majesty. Even 
in the separate decorations, such as the metopes and 
friezes, the graceful women and the long-flowing 
draperies of the Ionic school were combined with the 
muscular nakedness of the Doric athlete, as repre- 
sented by Doric masters. Individual Attic masters 
worked out these contrasted types completely, as we 
may see by the Discobolus of Myron, a contemporary 
of Pheidias, and the Apollo Musagetes of Scopas, who 
lived somewhat later. 1 

In fact, all Athenian character, in its best days, 
combined the versatility, and luxury, and fondness of 
pleasure, which marked the Ionian, with the energy, 
the public spirit, and the simplicity which was said to 
mark the better Doric states. The Parthenon and 
Erechtheum express all this in visible clearness. The 

1 I speak, of course, of the copies of these famous statues which are 
to be seen in the Vatican Museum. 



iv ATHENS— THE ACROPOLIS 89 

Athenians felt that the Ionic elegance and luxury of 
style was best suited to a small building ; and so they 
lavished ornament and colour upon this beautiful little 
house, but made the Doric temple the main object of 
all the sacred height. 

It is worth while to consult the professional archi- 
tects, like Revett, 1 who have examined these buildings 
with a critical eye. Not only were the old Athenian 
architects perfect masters of their materials, of accurate 
measurement, of precise correspondence, of all calcula- 
tion as to strain and pressure — they even for artistic, 
as well as for practical, purposes, deviated system- 
atically from the accuracy of right lines and angles, in 
order that the harmony of the building might profit 
by this imperceptible discord. They gave and took, 
like a tuner tempering the chords of a musical instru- 
ment. The stylobate is not exactly level, but curved 
so as to rise four inches in the centre \ the pillars, 
which themselves swell slightly towards the middle, 
are not set perpendicularly, but with a slight incline 
inwards : and this effect is given in the Caryatids by 
making them rest their weight on the outer foot at 
each corner, as Viollet-le-duc has admirably explained. 
Again, the separation of the pillars is less at the corners, 
and gradually increases as you approach the centre of 
the building. The base of the pediment is not a 
right line, but is curved downward. Mr. Flinders 

1 The illustrated work of Michaelis is probably the most complete 
and critical account both of the plan and the details, which have often 
been discussed, and especially with great accuracy by Mr. Penrose, whose 
monumental work, the Principles of Athenian Architecture, has recently 
been republished. Among the many newer works, I would call special 
attention to the first volume of Viollet-le-duc's Entrctiem sur V Architec- 
ture, already translated into English, which is full of most instruct- 
ing and suggestive observations on Greek architecture. A beautiful 
set of drawings of the Erechtheum was to be seen during my last 
visit (1905) in the American school — the work of a member of the 
•chool. 



90 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Petrie showed me (in 1905) that the variations in 
the working of the flutings of the pillars never 
amounted to a millimetre, which suggests that the 
many blocks laid aside were merely rejected owing to 
some imperfection so slight as to be imperceptible to us. 
But it is not my province to go into minute details 
on such points, which can only be adequately discussed 
by architects. What I have here to note is, that the 
old Greek builders had gone beyond mere mathe- 
matical accuracy. They knew a higher law than the 
slavish repetition of accurate distances or intervals, 
though the repetition of the ratio 4 : 9 is frequent 
enough to show a definite law in the construction ; 
they had learned to calculate effects, to allow for 
optical illusions ; they knew how to sacrifice real for 
ideal symmetry. 

The sculptures of the Parthenon have given rise 
to a considerable literature — so considerable that the 
books and treatises upon them now amount to a 
respectable library. The example was set by the 
architect of the building itself, Ictinus, who wrote a 
special treatise on his masterpiece. As is well known, 
the building was sketched in chalk by the French 
painter, Jacques Carrey, a few years before the ex- 
plosion of 1687; and though he had but very im- 
perfect notions of Greek art, and introduced a good 
deal of seventeenth -century style into the chaste 
designs of Pheidias, still these drawings, of which there 
are copies in the British Museum, are of great value in 
helping us to put together the broken and imperfect 
fragments which remain. 1 

The sculptured decorations of the building are of 
three kinds, or applied in three distinct places. In the 
first place, the two triangular pediments over the east 

1 They will be most readily consulted in the plates of Michaclis's 
Parthtnofu 



iv ATHENS— THE ACROPOLIS 91 

and west front were each filled with a group of statues 
more than life-size — the one representing the birth of 
Athena, and the other her contest with Poseidon for 
the patronage of Athens. Some of the figures from 
one of these are the great draped headless women in 
the centre of the Parthenon room of the British 
Museum : other fragments of these broken by the 
Venetians are preserved at Athens. There are, 
secondly, the metopes^ or plaques of stone inserted into 
the opening between the triglyphs, and carved in 
relief with a single small group on each. The height 
of these surfaces does not exceed four feet. There 
was, thirdly, a band of reliefs running all round the 
external wall at the top of the cella, inside the sur- 
rounding pillars, and opposite to them, and this is 
known as the frieze of the cella. It consists of a great 
Panathenaic procession, starting from the western 
front, and proceeding in two divisions along the 
parallel north and south walls, till they meet on the 
eastern front, which was the proper front of the 
temple. Among the Elgin marbles there are a good 
many of the metopes, and also of the pieces of the 
cella frieze preserved. Several other pieces of the 
frieze are preserved at Athens, and altogether we can 
reconstruct fully three - fourths of this magnificent 
composition. 

There seems to me the greatest possible difference 
in merit between the metopes and the other two parts 
of the ornament. The majority of the metopes re- 
present either a Greek and an Amazon, or a Centaur 
and Lapith, in violent conflict. The main object of 
these contorted groups was to break in upon the 
squareness and straightness of all the other members 
of the Doric frieze and architrave. This is admirably 
done, as there is no conceivable design which more 
completely breaks the stiff rectangles of the entablature 



92 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

than the various and violent curves of wrestling figures. 
But, otherwise, these groups do not appear to me very 
interesting, except so far as everything in such a place, 
and the work of such hands, must be interesting. 

It is very different with the others. Of these the 
pediment sculptures — which were, of course, the most 
important, and which were probably the finest groups 
ever designed — are so much destroyed or mutilated, 
that the effect of the composition is entirely lost, and 
we can only admire the matchless power and grace of 
the torsos which remain. The grouping of the figures 
was limited, and indicated by the triangular shape or 
the surface to be decorated — standing figures occupy- 
ing the centre, while recumbent or stooping figures 
occupied the ends. But, as in poetry, where the 
shackles of rhyme and metre, which encumber the 
thoughts of ordinary writers, are the very source which 
produces in the true poet the highest and most precious 
beauties of expression ; so in sculpture and painting, 
fixed conditions seem not to injure, but to enhance 
and perfect, the beauty and symmetry attainable in 
the highest art. We have in the famous Niobe group, 
preserved in Florence, the elements of a similar 
composition, perhaps intended to fill the triangular 
tympanum of a temple ; and even in these weak 
Roman copies of a Greek masterpiece we can see how 
beautifully the limited space given to the sculpture 
determined the beauty and variety of the figures, and 
their attitudes. It was in this genius of grouping that 
I fancy Pheidias chiefly excelled all his contemporaries : 
single statues of Polycleitus are said to have been pre- 
ferred in competitions. To us the art of the Discobolus 
of Myron seems fully as great as that of any of the 
figures of the Parthenon ; but no other artist seems to 
have possessed the same architectonic power of adapting 
large subjects and processions of figures to their places 



iv ATHENS— THE ACROPOLIS 93 

as Pheidias. 1 How far he was helped or advised by 
Ictinus, or even by Pericles, it is not easy to say. 
But I do not fancy that Greek statesmen in those days 
studied everything else in the world besides state- 
craft, and posed as antiquaries, and linguists, and 
connoisseurs of china and paintings, and theologians, 
and novelists, and metaphysicians — in fact, everything 
else under the sun. This manysidedness, as they now 
call it, which the Greeks called iroXvTrpayfxoo-vvr), and 
thought to be meddlesomeness, was not likely to infect 
Pericles. He was very intimate with Pheidias, and is 
said to have constantly watched his work — hardly, I 
fancy, as an adviser, but rather as a humble and 
enthusiastic admirer of an art which did realise its 
ideal, while he himself was striving in vain with rebel 
forces to attain his own in politics. 

The extraordinary power of grouping in the designs 
of Pheidias is, however, very completely shown us in 
the better -preserved band of the cella frieze, along 
which the splendid Panathenaic procession winds its 
triumphal way. Over the eastern doorway were 
twelve noble sitting figures on either side of the 
officiating priest, presenting the state robe, or peplos^ 
for the vestment of Athena. These figures are ex- 
plained as gods by the critics ; but they do not, in 
either beauty or dignity, excel those of many of the 
Athenians forming the procession. A very fine slab, 
containing three of these figures, is now to be seen in 
the museum of the Acropolis. This group over the 
main entrance is the end and summary of all the 

1 The discovery of the figures from the western pediment of the 
temple at Olympia, carved by Alcamenes, a contemporary of Pheidias, 
will hardly lead us to modify this judgment. For though they show a 
great talent in the composition, the defects in execution are so grave, 
as to lead many critics to suspect that we have in them the work of 
mere local artists, certainly not the masterful hands that adorned the 
Parthenon. 



94 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

procession, and corresponds with the yearly ceremony 
in this way, that, as the state entrance, or Propylaea, 
led into the Acropolis at the west end, or rear of the 
Parthenon, the procession in all probability separated 
into two, which went along both sides of the colonnade, 
and met again at the eastern door. Accordingly, over 
the western end, or rear, the first preparations of the 
procession are being made, which then starts along 
the north and south walls ; the southern being chiefly 
occupied with the cavalcade of the Athenian knights, 
the northern with the carrying of sacred vessels, and 
leading of victims for the sacrifice. The frieze over 
the western door is still in its place ; but, having lost 
its bright colouring, and being in any case at a great 
height, and only visible from close underneath, on 
account of the pillars and architrave in front, it pro- 
duces no effect and is hardly discernible. Indeed it 
evidently was never more than an architectural orna- 
ment, in spite of all its artistic beauty. 

The greater number of the pieces carried away by 
Lord Elgin seem taken from the equestrian portion, 
in which groups of cantering and curveting horses, 1 
and men in the act of mounting, and striving to curb 
restive steeds, are brought together with extraordinary 
effect. We can see plainly how important a part of 
Athenian splendour depended upon their knights, and 
how true are the hints of Aristophanes about their 
social standing and aristocratic tone. The reins and 
armour, or at least portions of it, were laid on in 
metal, and have accordingly been long since plundered; 
nor has any obvious trace remained of the rich colours 
with which the whole was painted. There appears 

1 The horses are but ponies in size, and made very light in the legs, 
probably because they are seen from below. The type of the head is that 
of the present Persian horse, only to be seen in Europe in the heads of 
the knights on our chessboards. 






iv ATHENS— THE ACROPOLIS 95 

no systematic uniform, some of the riders being dressed 
in helmets and cuirasses, some in felt wide-awakes, and 
short flying cloaks. It must remain uncertain whether 
the artist did not seek to obtain variety by this devia- 
tion from a fixed dress. There can be no doubt that 
Greek art was very bold and free in such matters. 
On the other hand, the type of the faces does not 
exhibit much variety. At the elevation above the 
spectator which this frieze occupied, individual expres- 
sion would have been thrown away on figures of three 
feet in height : the general dress, and the attitudes, 
may have been, when coloured, easily discernible. 

But I confess that this equestrian procession does 
not appear to me so beautiful as the rows of figures on 
foot (carrying pitchers and other implements, leading 
victims, and playing pipes), which come from the 
north wall, and of which the most beautiful slabs are 
preserved at Athens. Here we can see best of all 
that peculiar stamp which shows the age of Pheidias 
to have been the most perfect in the whole of Greek 
sculpture. This statement will not be accepted readily 
by the general public. The Apollo Belvedere, the 
Capitoline Venus, the Dying Gladiator — these are 
what we have been usually taught to regard as the 
greatest wonders of Greek plastic art ; and those who 
have accustomed themselves to this realistic and sensu- 
ous beauty will not easily see the greatness and the 
perfection of the solemn and chaste art of Pheidias. 

Nevertheless, it will always be held by men who 
have thought long enough on the subject, that the 
epoch when Myron and Pheidias, Polycleitus and Poly- 
gnotus, broke loose from archaic stiffness into flowing 
grace was, indeed, the climax of the arts. There 
seems a sort of natural law — of slow and painful origin 
— of growing development — of sudden bloom into 
perfection — of luxury and effeminacy — of gradual 



96 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

debasement and decay — which affects almost all the 
arts as well as most of the growths of nature. In 
Greek art particularly this phenomenon perpetually 
reappears. There can be little doubt that the Iliad of 
Homer was the first and earliest long creation in 
poetry, the first attempt, possibly with the aid of 
writing, to rise from short disconnected lays to the 
greatness of a formal epic. And despite all its defects 
of plan and its obvious incongruities, this greatest of 
all poems has held its place against the more finished 
and interesting Odyssey^ the more elaborated Cyclic 
poems, the more learned Alexandrian epics — in fact, 
the first full bloom of the art was by far the most 
perfect. It is the same thing with Greek tragedy. 
No sooner had the art escaped from the rude waggon, 
or stage, or whatever it was, of Thesp'is, than we find 
iEschylus, with imperfect appliances, with want of 
experience, with many crudenesses, a tragic poet never 
equalled again in Greek history. Of course the 
modern critics of his own country preferred, first 
Sophocles, and then Euripides — great poets, as Praxi- 
teles and Lysippus were great sculptors, and like 
them, perhaps, greater masters of human passion and 
of soul-stirring pathos. But for all that^ iEschylus 
is the tragic poet of the Greeks — the poet who has 
reached beyond his age and nation and fascinated the 
greatest men even of our century, who seek not to 
turn back upon his great but not equal rivals. Shelley 
and Mr. Swinburne have both made iEschylus their 
master, and to his inspiration owe the most splendid 
of their works. 

I will not prosecute these considerations further, 
though there may be other examples in the history of 
art. But I will say this much concerning the psycho- 
logical reasons of so strange a phenomenon. It may, 
of course, be assumed that the man who breaks 



iv ATHENS— THE ACROPOLIS 97 

through the old, stiff conventional style which has 
bound his predecessors with its shackles is necessarily 
a man of strong and original genius. Thus, when 
we are distinctly told of Polygnotus that he first began 
to vary the features of the human face from their archaic 
stiffness, we have before us a man of bold originality, 
who . quarrelled with the tradition of centuries, and 
probably set against him all the prejudices and the 
consciences of the graver public. But to us, far 
different features seem prominent. For, in spite of 
all his boldness, when we can compare such a man 
with his forerunners, we are struck with his modesty 
and devoutness, as compared with his successors. 
There is in him, first, an old-fashioned piety, which 
they have not ; and as art in this shape is almost 
always a handmaid of religion, this devoutness is a 
prominent feature. Next, there is a certain reticence 
and modesty in such a man, which arises partly from 
the former feeling, but still more from a conservative 
fear of violent change, and a healthy desire to make 
his work not merely a contrast to, but a development 
of, the older traditions. Then the old draped goddess 
of religious days, such as those on the Parthenon, 
made way for the splendid but yet more human 
handling which we may see in the Venus of Melos, 
now in the Louvre. 1 This half- draped but yet 
thoroughly new and chaste conception leads naturally 
to the type said to have been first dared by Praxiteles, 
who did not disguise the use of very unworthy human 
models to produce his famous, or perhaps infamous idea], 
known in so many of our naked Aphrodites. There 
is, too, in the earlier artist that limited mastery over 
materials, which, like the laws of the poet's language, 
only condenses and intensifies the beauty of his work. 

1 She is known to be of late origin, but is obviously a fine effort to 
reproduce the style of about 370 b.c. 

H 



98 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Such reserve, as compared with the later phases of 
the art, is nowhere so strongly shown as in the matter 
of expression. This is, indeed, the rock on which 
most arts have ultimately made shipwreck. When the 
power over materials and effects becomes complete, so 
that the artist can as it were perform feats of conquest; 
when at the same time the feeling has died out that 
he is treading upon holy ground, we have splendid 
achievements in the way of intense expression, whether 
physical or mental, of force, of momentary action, of 
grief or joy, which are good and great, but which lead 
imitators into a false track, and so ruin the art which 
they were thought to perfect. Thus overreaching 
itself, art becomes an anxious striving after display, 
and, like an affected and meretricious woman, repels 
the sounder natures, which had else been attracted by 
her beauty. In Greek art especially, as I have already 
noticed in discussing the Attic tomb reliefs, this excess 
of expression was long and well avoided, and there is 
no stronger and more marked feature in its good 
epochs than the reserve of which I have spoken. It 
is the chief quality which makes the school of Pheidias 
matchless. There is in it beauty of form, there is a 
good deal of action, there is in the frieze an almost 
endless variety ; but withal there is the strictest 
symmetry, the closest adherence to fixed types, 1 the 
absence of all attempt at expressing passing emotion. 
There is still the flavour of the old stiff simplicity 
about the faces, about the folds of the robes, about 
the type of the horses ; but the feeling of the artist 
shines through the archaic simplicity with much clearer 
light than it does in the more ambitious attempts of 
the later school. The greatest works of Pheidias — his 

1 We now know that even the general subject of the frieze was not a 
novelty. There is a similar design to be seen in the frieze of the famous 
treasure-house of the Cnidians at Delphi. 



iv ATHENS— THE ACROPOLIS 99 

statue of Zeus at Elis, and his Athene in the Parthenon 
— are lost to us j but the ancients are unanimous that 
for simple and sustained majesty no succeeding sculptor, 
however brilliant, had approached his ideal. 1 

We may say almost the same of the great temple 
which he adorned with his genius. It is just that 
perfection of the Doric temple which has escaped from 
the somewhat ponderous massiveness and simplicity of 
the older architecture, while it sacrificed no element 
of majesty to that grace and delicacy which marks later 
and more developed Greek architecture. 

In its great days, and even as Pausanias saw it, the 
Acropolis was covered with statues, as well as with 
shrines. It was not merely a Holy of Holies in 
religion ; it was also a palace and museum of art. At 
every step and turn the traveller met new objects of 
interest. There were archaic specimens, chiefly 
interesting to the antiquarian and the devotee - f there 
were the great masterpieces which were the admiration 
both of the artist and the vulgar. Even all the sides 
and slopes of the great rock were honeycombed into 
sacred grottos, with their altars and their gods, or 
studded with votive monuments. All these lesser 
things are fallen away and gone 5 the sacred caves 
are filled with rubbish. The grotto of Pan and Apollo 
is difficult of access, and was, when I first saw it, an 
object of disgust rather than of interest. There are 
left but the remnants of the surrounding wall, and the 
ruins of the three principal buildings, which were the 
envy and wonder of all the civilised world. 

The walls are particularly well worth studying, as 
there are to be found in them specimens of all kinds 

1 It is very uncertain, perhaps unlikely, that any of the architectural 
sculpture we possess was actually finished by Pheidias's own hand. But 
there can be no doubt that he directed it, and must have designed 
much of it in detail, since the general composition was certainly hit 
work. 



ioo RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

of building, beginning from prehistoric times. There 
is even plain evidence that the builders of the age of 
Pericles were not by any means the best wall builders ; 
for the masonry of the wall called the Wall of Themis- 
tocles, which is well preserved in the lowest part 
of the course along the north slope, is by far the most 
beautifully finished work of the kind which can any- 
where be seen : and it seems to correspond accurately 
to the lower strata of the foundations on which the 
Parthenon was built. The builders of Pericles's time 
added a couple of layers of stone to raise the site of 
the temple, and their work contrasts curiously in its 
roughness with the older platform. Any one who 
will note the evident admiration of Thucydides for 
the walls built round the Peiraeus by the men of an 
earlier generation will see good reason for this feeling 
when they examine these details. 

The beautiful little temple of Athena Nike, though 
outside the Propylaea — thrust out as it were on a sort 
of great bastion high on the right as you enter — must 
still be called a part, and a very striking part, of the 
Acropolis. It is only of late years that the site has 
been cleared of rubbish and modern stonework, and 
the temple rebuilt from the original materials, thus 
destroying, no doubt, some precious traces of Turkish 
occupation which the fastidious historian may regret, 
but realising to us a beautiful Greek temple of the 
Ionic Order in some completeness. The peculiarity 
of this building, which is perched upon a platform of 
stone and commands a splendid prospect, is, that its 
tiny peribolus, or sacred enclosure, was surrounded by 
a parapet of stone slabs covered with exquisite reliefs 
of winged Victories, in various attitudes. Some of 
these slabs are now in the museum of the Acropolis, 
and are of great interest — apparently less severe than 
the school of Pheidias, and therefore later in date, but 



iv ATHENS— THE ACROPOLIS 101 

still of the best epoch, and of marvellous grace. The 
position of this temple also is not parallel with the 
Propylaea, but turned slightly outwards, so that the 
light strikes it at moments when the other building is 
not illuminated. At the opposite side is a very well 
preserved chamber, and a fine colonnade at right angles 
with the gate, which looks like a guard-room. This 
is the chamber commonly called the Pinacotheca, where 
Pausanias saw pictures or frescoes by Polygnotus. 

The museum on the Acropolis requires but little 
comment, and is very easily seen and appreciated. I 
have already spoken of the archaic damsels, who look 
upon the visitors in their bright colours, their careful 
plaits of hair, and their stereotyped smile. I will only 
add here that the latest addition to the Museum is the 
strangest — great dragons in poros-stone and coloured, 
which are either in conflict with Herakles or hurrying 
along what we conceive to be the pediment of the 
original temple in the sixth century B.C. These 
archaic, nay, even barbaric monsters, which have the 
appearance of being moulded in terra-cotta, come upon 
us with a shock, so different are they from anything 
tolerated in the maturity of Greek art. It is difficult 
to imagine the Athens of Solon with such ornaments, 
and yet this was certainly the case, and it brings 
home to us the vital fact that the development of 
Attic art from archaic clumsiness to the highest 
symmetry and grace was accomplished in a single 
generation. 

I will venture to conclude this chapter with a 
curious comparison. It was my good fortune, a few 
months after I had seen the Acropolis, to visit a rock 
in Ireland, which, to my great surprise, bore many 
curious analogies to it — I mean the Rock of Cashel. 
Both were strongholds of religion — honoured and 
hallowed above all other places in their respective 



102 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap.iv 

countries — both were covered with buildings of various 
dates, each representing peculiar ages and styles in art. 
And as the Greeks, I suppose for effect's sake, have 
varied the posture of their temples, so that the sun 
illumines them at different moments, the old Irish 
have varied the orientation of their churches, that the 
sun might rise directly over against the east window 
on the anniversarv of the patron saint. There is at 
Cashel the great Cathedral — in loftiness and grandeur 
the Parthenon of the place ; there is the smaller and 
more beautiful Cormac's Chapel, the holiest of all, 
like the Erechtheum at Athens. Again, the great 
sanctuary upon the Rock of Cashel was surrounded by 
a cluster of abbeys about its base, which were founded 
there by pious men on account of the greatness and 
holiness of the archiepiscopal seat. Of these, one 
remains, like the Theseum at Athens, eclipsed by the 
splendour of the Acropolis. 

The prospect from the Irish sanctuary has, indeed, 
endless contrasts to that from the pagan stronghold, 
but they are suggestive contrasts, and are not with- 
out a certain harmony. The plains around both 
are framed by mountains, of which the Irish are prob- 
ablv the more picturesque ; and if the light upon the 
Greek hills is the fairest, the native colour of the Irish 
is infinitely more rich. So, again, the soil of Attica is 
light and dusty, whereas the Golden Vale of Tipperary 
is among the richest and greenest in the world. Still, 
both places were the noblest homes, each in their own 
country, of religions which civilised, humanised, and 
exalted the human race ; and if the Irish Acropolis is 
left in dim obscurity by the historical splendour of the 
Parthenon, on the other hand, the gods of the Athenian 
stronghold have faded out before the moral greatness of 
tjie faith preached from the Rock of Cashel. 



CHAPTER V 

ATHENS THE THEATRE OF DIONYSUS THE 

AREOPAGUS 

There are few recent excavations about Athens which 
have been so productive as those along the south slope 
of the Acropolis. In the conflicts and the wear of 
ages, a vast quantity of earth, and walls, and fragments 
of buildings has either been cast, or has rolled, down 
this steep descent, so that it was with a certainty of 
good results that the Archaeological Society of Athens 
undertook to clear this side of the rock of all the 
accumulated rubbish. Several precious inscriptions 
were found, which had been thrown down from the 
rock ; and in April 1884 the whole plan of the temple 
of iEsculapius had been uncovered, and another step 
attained in fixing the much -disputed topography of 
this part of Athens. 

And yet we can hardly call this a beginning. Some 
seventy years ago a very extensive and splendidly success- 
ful excavation was made on an adjoining site, when a 
party of German archaeologists laid bare the Theatre 
of Dionysus — the great theatre in which i^schylus, 
Sophocles, and Euripides brought out their immortal 
plays before an immortal audience. There is nothing 
more delightful than to descend from the Acropolis, 
and rest awhile in the comfortable marble arm-chairs 
with which the front row of the circuit is occupied. 

103 



104 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

They are of the pattern usual with the sitting portrait 
statues of the Greeks — very deep, and with a curved 
back, which exceeds both in comfort and in grace any 
chairs designed by modern workmen. 1 Each chair 
has the name of a priest inscribed on it, showing how 
the theatre among the Greeks corresponded to our 
cathedral, and this front row to the stalls of canons 
and prebendaries. 

But unfortunately all this sacerdotal prominence is 
probably the work of the later restorers of the theatre. 
For after having been first beautified and adorned with 
statues by Lycurgus (in Demosthenes's time), it was 
again restored and embellished by Herodes Atticus, or 
about his time, so that the theatre, as we now have it, 
can only be called the building of the second or third 
century after Christ. The front wall of the stage, 
which is raised some feet above the level of the empty 
pit, is adorned with a row of very elegant sculptures, 
amongst which one — a shaggy old man, in a stooping 
posture, represented as coming out from within, and 
holding up the stone above him — is particularly striking. 
Some Greek is said to have knocked off, by way of 
amusement, the heads of most of these figures since 
they were discovered, but this I do not know upon any 
better authority than ordinary report. The pit or 
centre of the theatre is empty, and was never in Greek 
days occupied by seats, for here in the earliest times 
the chorus performed their dances, and sang their odes. 
But now there is a circuit of upright slabs of stone 
close to the front seats, which can hardly have been 
an arrangement of the old Greek theatre. They are 
generally supposed to have been added as a barrier 

1 This very pattern, in mahogany, with deep curved backs, with legs 
bent forward and back, with cane seats, and adapted, like all Greek 
chairs, for loose cushions, was used in eighteenth-century work, and may 
still be found in old Irish mansions furnished at that epoch. 



v THEATRE OF DIONYSUS 105 

when the building came to be used for contests of 
gladiators, which Dion Chrysostom tells us were im- 
ported from Corinth to Athens in his day. 

All these later additions and details are, I fear, 
calculated to detract from the reader's interest in this 
theatre, which I should indeed regret — for nothing can 
be more certain than that this is the veritable stone 
theatre which was built when the wooden one broke 
down, at the great competition of iEschylus and 
Pratinas ; and though front seats may have been added, 
and slight modifications introduced, the general struc- 
ture can never have required alteration. The main 
body of the curved rows of seats have no backs, but 
are so deep as to leave plenty of room for the feet of 
the people next above ; and I fancy that in the old 
times the irpo&pia or right of sitting in the front rows 
was not given to priests, but to foreign embassies, 
along with the chief magistrates of Athens. The 
cost of admission was two obols to all the seats of the 
house not specially reserved, and such reservation was 
only for persons of official rank, and by no means for 
richer people, or for a higher entrance money — a thing 
which would not have been tolerated, I believe, for an 
instant by the Athenian democracy. 1 When the state 
treasury grew full with the tribute of the subject cities, 
the citizens had this sum, and at times even more, 
distributed to them in order that no one might be 
excluded from the annual feast, and so the whole free 
population of Athens came together without expense 
to worship the gods by enjoying themselves in this 
great theatre. 

It is indeed very large, though exaggerated state- 
ments have been made about its size. It is generally 
stated that the enormous number of 30,000 people 

1 I state this because many critics have drawn an opposite inference 
from the mistranslation of a passage in Plato {ApoU 26, E). 



io6 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

could fit into it — a statement quite absurd 5 1 and it is 
not nearly as large as other theatres, viz. at Syracuse, 
at Megalopolis, or at Argos. This also is certain, 
that any one speaking on the stage, as it now is, can 
be easily and distinctly heard by people sitting on the 
highest row of seats now visible, which cannot have 
been far from the original top of the house. Such a 
thing is impossible where 30,000 people, or any crowd 
approaching that number, could be seated. We hear, 
however, that the old actors had recourse to various 
artificial means of increasing the range of their voices, 
which shows that in some theatres the difficulty was 
felt ; and in the extant plays asides are so rare 2 that it 
must have been thought difficult to give them with 
effect. 

In one respect, however, the voice must have been 
more easily heard through the old house than it now 
is through the ruins. The back behind the actors 
was built up with a high wooden structure to repre- 
sent fixed scenes, and even a sort of upper storey on 
which gods and flying figures sometimes appeared — 
an arrangement which of course threw the voice 
forward into the theatre. There used to be an old 
idea, not perhaps yet extinct, that the Greek audiences 
had the lovely natural scenery of their country for 
their stage decoration, and that they embraced in one 
view the characters on the stage, and the coasts and 

1 The exact number, according to Papadakis (cf. A. Mtiller, Buhnenalt. 
p. 47), is stated at 27,500. But this is a great exaggeration. The 
reader may take 15,000 as a liberal estimate ; and this agrees with the 
measurements made for me by Dr. Dorpfeld in 1889, and he has since 
published them. After this scientific decision, the repetition of the old 
blunder in modern books only shows how long a false statement, even 
when formally disproved, may survive. The mistake was due to mis- 
understanding a passage in Plato's Symposium, which says that ' Agathon, 

whom 30,000 citizens hear ' It is not said that they all heard him 

at the same time. 

a Cf. on this point my History of Greek Literature, i. p. 345. 



v THEATRE OF DIONYSUS 107 

islands for miles behind them. Nothing can be more 
absurd, or more opposed to Greek feeling on such 
matters. In the first place, as is well known, a 
feeling for the beauty of landscape as such was almost 
foreign to the Greeks, who never speak of the pictur- 
esque in their literature without special relation to the 
sounds of nature, or to the intelligences which were 
believed to pervade and animate it : a fine view as 
such had little attraction for them. In the second 
place, they came to the theatre to enjoy poetry, and 
the poetry of character, of passion, of the relation of 
man and his destiny to the course of Divine Provi- 
dence and Divine justice — in short, to assume a 
frame of mind perfectly inconsistent with the dis- 
tractions of landscape. For that purpose they had 
their acting place, as we now know, filled in at the 
back with high painted scenes, which in earlier days 
were made of light woodwork and canvas, to bear easy 
removal, or change, but which in most Graeco-Roman 
theatres, like the very perfect one at Aspendus, or 
indeed that of Herodes Atticus close by at Athens, 
were a solid structure of at least two storeys high, 
which absolutely excluded all prospect. 

But even had the Athenians not been protected by 
this arrangement from outer disturbance, I found by 
personal investigation that there was no view for them 
to enjoy ! Except from the highest tiers, and there- 
fore from the worst places, the sea and islands are not 
visible, and the only view to be obtained, supposing 
that houses did not obstruct it, would have been the 
dull, somewhat bleak, undulating hills which stretch 
between the theatre and Phalerum. 

The back scenes of the Greek theatres were painted 
as ours are, and at first, I suppose, very rudely indeed, 
for we hear particularly of a certain Agatharchus, 
who developed the art of scene-painting by adopting 



108 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

perspective. 1 The other appurtenances of the Greek 
theatre were equally rude, or perhaps I should say 
equally stiff and conventional, and removed from any 
attempt to reproduce ordinary life — at least this was 
the case with their tragedy, their satyric dramas, and 
their older comedy, which dealt in masks, in fixed 
stage dresses, in tragic padding, and stuffing-out to 
an unnatural size, in comic distortions and indecent 
emblems — in all manner of conventional ugliness, we 
should say, handed down from the first religious origin 
of these performances, and maintained with that strict 
conservatism which marks the course of all great 
Greek art. The acting ground was long and narrow, 
the means of changing scenes cumbrous, and not 
frequently employed ; the number of the actors in 
tragedy strictly limited — four is an unusual number, 
exceptionally employed in the second CEdipus of 
Sophocles. In fact, we cannot say that the Greek 
drama ever became externally like ours till the 
comedies of Menander, and his school. These poets, 
living in an age when serious interests had decayed, 
when tragedy had ceased to be religious, and comedy 
political, when neither was looked upon any longer 
as a great public engine of instruction or of censure, 
turned to pictures of social life, not unlike our genteel 
comedy ; and in this species of drama, we may assert 
that the Greeks, except perhaps for masks, imitated the 
course of ordinary life. 

It is indeed said of Euripides, the real father of this 
new comedy, that he brought down the tragic stage 
from ideal heroism to the passions and meannesses of 
ordinary men ; and Sophocles, his rival, the supposed 
perfection of an Attic tragedian, is reputed to have 
observed that he himself had represented men as they 

1 Cf. on the details of Greek painting the last chapter of my Social 
Life in Greece. 



v THEATRE OF DIONYSUS 109 

ought to be, Euripides as they were. But any honest 
reader of Euripides will see at once how far he too is 
removed from the ordinary realisms of life. He saw, 
indeed, that human passion is the subject, of all others, 
which will permanently interest human thought ; he 
felt that the insoluble problems of Free Will and Fate, 
of the mercy and the cruelty of Providence, were too 
abstract on the one hand, and too specially Greek on 
the other ; that, after all, human nature as such is the 
great universal field on which any age can reach the 
sympathy and the interest of its remotest successors. 
But the passions painted by Euripides were no ordinary 
passions — they were great and unnatural crimes, forced 
upon suffering mortals by the action of hostile deities ; 
the virtues of Euripides were no ordinary virtues — 
they were great heroic self-sacrifices, and showed the 
Divine element in our nature, which no tyranny of 
circumstances can efFace. His Phaedra and Medea on 
the one hand, his Alcestis and Iphigenia on the other, 
were strictly characters as they ought to be in tragedy, 
and not as they commonly are in life; and in outward 
performance Euripides did not depart from the con- 
ventional stiffness, from the regular development, 
from the somewhat pompous and artificial dress, in 
which tragedy had been handed down to him by his 
masters. 

They, too, had not despised human nature — how 
could they? Both iEschylus and Sophocles were 
great painters of human character, as well in its 
passions as in its reasonings. But the former had 
made it accessory, so to speak, to the great religious 
lessons which he taught ; the latter had at least 
affected to do so, or imagined that he did, while 
really the labyrinths of human character had enticed 
and held him in their endless maze. Thus, all 
through Greek tragedy there was on the one hand 



no RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

a strong element of conventional stiffness, of adher- 
ence to fixed subjects, and scenes, and masks, and 
dresses — of adherence to fixed metres, and regular 
dialogues, where question and answer were balanced 
line for line, and the cast of characters was as 
uniform as it is in the ordinary Italian operas of 
our own day. But, on the other hand, these tragic 
poets were great masters of expression, profound 
students not only of the great world - problems, but 
of the problems of human nature, exquisite masters 
too of their language, not only in its dramatic force, 
but in its lyric sweetness ; they summed up in their 
day all that was great and beautiful in Greek poetry, 
and became the fullest and ripest fruit of that 
wonderful tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 
which even now makes those that taste it to be as 
gods. 

Such, then, were the general features of the tragedy 
which the Athenian public, and the married women, 
including many strangers, assembled to witness in 
broad daylight under the Attic sky. They were not 
sparing of their time. They ate a good breakfast 
before they came. They ate sweetmeats in the 
theatre when the acting was bad. Each play was 
short, and there was doubtless an interval of rest. 
But it is certain that each poet contended as a rule 
with four plays against his competitors ; and as there 
were certainly three of them, there must have been 
twelve plays acted ; this seems to exceed the endur- 
ance of any public, even allowing two days for the 
performance. We are not fully informed on these 
points. We do not even know how Sophocles, who 
contended with single plays, managed to compete 
against Euripides, who contended with sets of four. 
But we know that the judges were chosen by lot, 
and we strongly suspect, from the records of their 



v THEATRE OF DIONYSUS in 

decisions, that they often decided wrongly. We also 
know that the poets sought to please the audience by 
political and patriotic allusions, and to convey their 
dislike of opposed cities or parties by drawing their 
representatives in odious colours on the stage. Thus 
Euripides is never tired of traducing the Spartans in 
the character of Menelaus. iEschylus fights the 
battle of the Areopagus in his Eumenides. 

But besides all this, it seems that tragic poets were 
regarded as the proper teachers of morality, and that 
the stage among the Greeks occupied somewhat the 
place of the modern pulpit. This is the very attitude 
which Racine assumes in the Preface to his Phedre. 
He suggests that it ought to be considered the best 
of his plays, because there is none in which he has 
so strictly rewarded virtue, and punished vice. 1 He 
alters, in his Iphigenie^ the Greek argument from 
which he copied, because, as he tells us (again in the 
Preface), it would never do to have so virtuous a 

1 The actual passage is well worth quoting : ' Au reste, je n'ose en- 
core ajouter que cette piece soit en effet la meilleure de mes tragedies. 
Je laisserai aux lecteurs et au temps a decider de son veritable prix. Ce 
que je puis assurer, c'est que je n'en ai point fait ou la vertu soit plus 
mise en jour que dans celle-ci ; les moindres fautes y sont severement 
punies j la seule pensee du crime y est regardee avec autant d'horreur 
que le crime memej les faiblesses de l'amour y passent pour des vraies 
faiblesses j les passions n'y sont presentees aux yeux que pour montrer 
tous les desordres dont elles sont causes, et le vice y est peint partout 
avec des couleurs qui en ont fait connaitre et hai'r la diffbrmite. C'est 
la proprement le but que tout homme qui travaille pour le public se doit 
proposer ; et c'est que les premiers poetes tragiques avaient en vue sur 
toute chose. Leur theatre etait une ecole ou la vertu n'etait pas moins 
bien enseignee que dans les ecoles des philosophes. ... II serait a sou- 
haiter que nos ouvrages fussent aussi solides et aussi pleins d'utiles in- 
structions que ceux de ces poetes. Ce serait peut-etre un moyen de 
reconcilier la tragedie avec quantit6 de personnes cel£bres par leur piete 
et par leur doctrine, qui l'ont condamnee dans ces clerniers temps, et qui 
en jugeraient sans doute plus favorablement, si les auteurs songeaient 
autant a instruire les spectateurs qu'a les divertir, et s'ils suivaient en 
cela la veritable intention de la tragedie.' 



ii2 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

person as Iphigenia sacrificed. This, however, would 
not have been a stumbling-block to the Greek poet, 
whose capricious and spiteful gods, or whose deep 
conviction of the stain of an ancestral curse, would 
justify catastrophes which the Christian poet, with 
his trust in a benevolent Providence, could not admit. 
But, indeed, in most other points the so-called imita- 
tions of the Greek drama by Racine and his school 
are anything but imitations. The main characters 
and the general outline of the plot are no doubt 
borrowed. .The elegance and power of the dialogue 
are more or less successfully copied. But the natural 
and familiar scenes, which would have been shocking 
to the court of Louis XIV. — c ces scenes entremel^es 
de bas comique, et ces frequents exemples de mauvais 
ton et d'une familiarity choquante,' as Barthel£my 
says — such characters as the guard in the Antigone^ 
the nurse in the Choephoroe y the Phrygian in the 
Orestes^ were carefully expunged. Moreover, love 
affairs and court intrigues were everywhere intro- 
duced, and the language was never allowed to descend 
from its pomp and grandeur. Most of the French 
dramatists were indeed bad Greek scholars, 1 and knew 
the plays from which they copied either through very 
poor translations, or through the rhetorical travesties 
surviving under the name of Seneca, which were long 
thought fully equal to the great and simple originals. 

So the French of the seventeenth century, starting 
from these half- understood models, and applying 
rigidly the laws of tragedy which they had deduced, 
with questionable logic, from that very untrustworthy 
guide, our text of the Poetics of Aristotle, created a 
drama which became so unlike what it professed to 
imitate, that most modern French critics have occupied 
themselves with the contrasts of old Greek tragedy to 

1 Racine is here the exception. 



v THEATRE OF DIONYSUS 113 

that of the modern stage. They are always praising 
the naivete 1 ^ the familiarity, the irregularity of the old 
dramatists ; they are always noting touches of com- 
mon life and of ordinary motive quite foreign to the 
dignity of Racine, and Voltaire, and Alfleri. 1 They 
think that the real parallel is to be found not among 
them, but in Shakespeare. Thus their education 
makes them emphasise the very qualities which we 
admit, but should not cite, as the peculiarities of 
Greek tragedy. We are rather struck with its con- 
ventionalities, with its strict adherence to fixed form, 
with its somewhat stilted diction, and we wonder 
how it came to be so great and natural within these 
trammels. 

Happily the tendency in our own day to reproduce 
antiquity faithfully, and not in modern recasting, has 
led to the translating, and even to the representing, of 
Greek tragedies in their purity, and it does not require 
a knowledge of Greek to obtain some acquaintance 
with these great masterpieces. Robert Browning, 
Dean Milman, Mr. Arthur S. Way, Mr. Whitelaw, 
and many others, have placed faithful and elegant 
versions within our reach. But since I have cautioned 
the reader not versed in Greek against adopting 
Racine's or Alfred's plays as adequate substitutes, I 
venture to give the same advice concerning the more 
Greek and antique plays of Mr. Swinburne, which, 
in spite of their splendour, are still not really Greek 
plays, but modern plays based on Greek models. 
The relief produced by ordinary talk from ordinary 
characters, which has been already noticed, is greatly 

1 Alfieri, though starting with a violent feeling of reaction against 
some of the faults of the French drama, was wholly trained upon it, and 
only knew the Greek plays through French versions until very late in 
life, when most of his works were already published. I therefore claa* 
him unhesitatingly as an offshoot of that school. 

I 



ii 4 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

wanting in his very lofty, and perhaps even strained, 
dialogue. Nor are his choruses the voice of the 
vulgar public, combining high sentiments with prac- 
tical meanness, but elaborate and very difficult specu- 
lations, which comment metaphysically on the general 
problems of the play. There is nothing better worth 
reading than the Atalanta in Calydon. The Greek 
scholar sees everywhere how thoroughly imbued the 
author is with Greek models. But it will not give to 
the mere English reader any accurate idea of a real 
Greek tragedy. He must go to Balaustiori 's Adven- 
ture^ or Aristophanes'' Apology, or some other professed 
translation, and follow inline for line, adding some such 
general reviews as the Etudes of M. Patin. 1 

As for revivals of Greek plays, it seems to me not 
likely that they will ever succeed. The French imita- 
tions of Racine laid hold of the public because they 
were not imitations. And as for us nowadays, who 
are more familiar with the originals, a faithless repro- 
duction would shock us, while a literal one would 
weary us. This at least is the effect which the 
Antigone produces, even with the modern choruses of 
Mendelssohn to relieve the slowness of the action. 
But, of course, a reproduction of the old chorus would 
be simply impossible. 2 

As to old Attic comedy, it would be even more 
impossible to recover it for a modern public. Its local 
and political allusions, its broad and coarse humour, its 
fantastic dresses, were features which made it not 
merely ancient and Greek, but Athenian, and Athenian 

1 Milton's Samson and Matthew Arnold's Mer«pe are still the best 
reproductions of the form and spirit of a Greek tragedy. 

2 This was written before the very interesting revivals of Greek plays, 
which do such honour to Cambridge and to Bradfield College. Those 
who had the privilege of seeing them can judge not only how far a 
reproduction was possible, but how far it can succeed, for never will it 
be more ably undertaken and carried out. 



v THEATRE OF DIONYSUS 115 

of a certain epoch. Without the Alexandrian scholiasts, 
who came in time to reco 'er and note down most of 
the allusions, these comedies would be to the Greek 
scholar of to-day hardly intelligible. The new Attic 
comedy, of which Terence is a copy, is indeed on a 
modern basis, and may be faithfully reproduced, if not 
admired, in our day. But here, alas ! the great 
originals of Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus are 
lost to us, and we must be content with the Latin 
accommodations. 

New light has been thrown upon the arrangement 
of the Attic stage by the researches and the specula- 
tions of Dr. Dorpfeld. He denies altogether the 
existence in the purely Greek theatre of any raised 
stage, and holds that the actors played on the same 
level as the chorus, which occupied the orchestra or 
pit of the theatre. The historic evolution of the 
matter seems to me as follows : In the earliest epoch 
the audience gathered to see the dancing, and hear the 
singing of the chorus only, with occasional solos from 
the leader of the chorus, and the best way to accom- 
modate a crowd was to raise tiers of seats all round 
a circular or oval dancing ground. Thus the earliest 
form would be, not a theatre, but what we call an 
amphitheatre. The steep slope of a hill would be 
naturally chosen to form one side of it ; the opposite 
side would be built up with wooden stands or hustings, 
containing tiers of seats. We hear of an occasion 
when the wooden part of the old theatre broke down, 
causing loss of life, and then, we are told, the 
Athenians built a theatre of stone. This seems to 
me misleading. One half of any natural theatre must 
always have been of stone or earth. But it is very 
likely that the breakdown of the wooden structure 
coincided with the moment when tragedy was develop- 
ing out of the old Dionysiac choruses, and when not 



n6 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

only some permanent decoration to represent the 
residence of the characters was required, but also 
dressing-rooms to conceal those who were not actually 
playing, till the moment of their entry. Hence the 
theatre was no longer rebuilt oval or circular, but a 
small section was cut off and adorned as the front of a 
palace with doors, through which the actors came on, 
but to the same level as the chorus in the central 
orchestra. From the ascending tiers of the new horse- 
shoe auditory, excavated in a suitable hillside, a large 
crowd could see and hear the new plays. The chorus 
could also address the actors, and even join in the 
action, without ascending any stairs, for there was no 
separation between stage and orchestra, save that the 
actors naturally played immediately in front oftheir house, 
so as not to turn their backs to any part of the audience. 

This simple and sensible arrangement lasted so long 
as the chorus remained an integral part of the drama. 
But when it ceased to be so, and the large orchestra 
was left empty, it was but natural that important 
Hellenistic or Roman personages should be accommo- 
dated with seats such as our pit stalls. Then it be- 
came necessary to raise the level of the actors, and so 
we have in most Greek theatres, such as that in which 
we are now sitting, a raised stage of the Roman epoch, 
which was quite foreign to the original building. 

This theory is no mere matter of curiosity in stage 
architecture. It helps us to understand the intimate 
relations of actors and chorus. For this latter was not 
only a spectator, but often an actor also, and dialogues 
between actors on a higher level of twelve feet, and 
the chorus below (the old theory) would really be 
ridiculous. 

I know very well that there are still advocates of 
the old view, and that it will be as hard to persuade 
them in this, as it has been in the capacity of the 



v ATHENS— THE AREOPAGUS 117 

Attic theatre, though any man of common sense can 
see the truth for himself. But I strongly advise the 
reader to regard the theatre from this point of view, 
which I have not adopted without a careful study of 
the evidence. 1 

But I have delayed too long over these Greek 
plays, and must apologise for leading away the reader 
from the actual theatre in which he is sitting. Yet 
there is hardly a place in Athens which calls back the 
mind so strongly to the old days, when all the crowd 
came jostling in, and settled down in their seats, to 
hear the great novelties of the year from Sophocles or 
Euripides. No doubt there were cliques and cabals 
and claqueurs, noisy admirers and cold critics, the 
supporters of the old, and the lovers of the new, 
devotees and sceptics, wondering foreigners and self- 
complacent citizens. They little thought how we 
should come, not only to sit in the seats they occupied, 
but to reverse the judgments which they pronounced, 
and correct with sober temper the errors of prejudice, 
of passion, and of pride. 

Plato makes Socrates say, in his Apologia {pro vita 
sua\ that a copy of Anaxagoras could be bought on 
the orchestra, when very dear, for a drachme, that is 
to say for about 9d. of our money, which may then 
have represented at least our three shillings in value. 2 
The commentators have made desperate attempts to 
explain this. Some say the orchestra was used as a 
book-stall when plays were not going on — an assump- 
tion justified by no other hint in Greek literature. 

1 The proper book for the student to read is the great work on the 
Greek theatre by Wm. Dbrpfeld and Emil Reich, unfortunately not yet 
translated from the German. 

a The reader who cares to consult the various prices cited in my Old 
Greek Life will see the grounds for assuming some such change in the 
value of money between the fourth century b.c. in Greece and the present 
time in England. 



u8 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap, 

Others have far more absurdly imagined that Plato 
really meant you could pay a drachme for the best 
seat in the theatre, and read the writings of Anaxagoras 
in a fashionable play of Euripides, who was his friend 
and follower. Verily a wonderful interpretation ! 

If the reader will walk with me from the theatre 
of Dionysus past the newly excavated site of the 
temple of iEsculapius, and past the Roman-Greek 
theatre which was erected by Hadrian or H erodes 
Atticus, I will show him what Plato meant. Of 
course, this later theatre, with its solid Roman back 
scenes of masonry, is as interesting as the Theatre of 
Dionysus to the advocates of the unity of history ! 
But to us who are content to study Greek Athens, it 
need not afford any irrelevant delays. Passing round 
the approach to the Acropolis, we come on to a lesser 
hill, separated from it by a very short saddle, so that it 
looks like a sort of outpost or spur sent out from the 
rock of the Acropolis. This is the Areopagus — Mars' 
Hill — which we can ascend in a few minutes. There 
are marks of old staircases cut in the rock. There 
are underneath, on our left and right, as we go up, 
deep black caverns, once the home of the Eumenides. 
On the flat top there are still some signs of a rude 
smoothing of the stone for seats. Under us, to the 
north, is the site of the old agora, once surrounded 
with colonnades, the crowded market-place of all those 
who bought and sold and talked. But on the descent 
from the Areopagus, and, now at least, not much 
higher than the level of the market-place beneath, 
there is a small semicircular platform, backed by the 
rising rock. This, or some platform close to it, which 
may now be hidden by accumulated soil, was the old 
orchestra, possibly the site of the oldest theatre, but in 
historical times a sort of reserved platform, where the 
Athenians, who had their town bristling with statues, 



v ATHENS— THE AREOPAGUS 119 

allowed no monument to be erected save the figures of 
Harmodius and Aristogiton, which were carried into 
Persia, replaced by others, afterwards recovered, and of 
which we may have a copy in the two fighting figures, 
of archaic character, now in the Museum of Naples. 
It was doubtless on this orchestra, just above the 
bustle and thoroughfare of the agora^ that booksellers 
kept their stalls, and here it was that the book of 
Anaxagoras could be bought for a drachme. 

Here then was the place where that physical phil- 
osophy was disseminated which first gained a few 
advanced thinkers ; then, through Euripides, leavened 
the drama, once the exponent of ancient piety ; then, 
through the stage, the Athenian public, till we arrive 
at those Stoics and Epicureans who came to teach 
philosophy and religion not as a faith but as a system, 
and to spend their time with the rest of the public in 
seeking out novelties of creed and of opinion as mere 
fashions with which people chose to dress their minds. 
And it was on this very Areopagus, where we are 
now standing, that these philosophers of fashion came 
into contact with the thorough earnestness, the pro- 
found convictions, the red-hot zeal of the Apostle 
Paul. The memory of that great scene still lingers 
about the place, and every guide will show you the 
exact place where the Apostle stood, and in what 
direction he addressed his audience. There are, I 
believe, even some respectable commentators who 
transfer their own estimate of S. Paul's importance 
to the Athenian public, and hold that it was before 
the Court of the Areopagus that he was asked to 
expound his views. 1 This is more than doubtful. 

1 I perceive that E. Renan, who alone of sceptical critics is persuaded, 
possibly by the striking picturesqueness of the scene, to accept it as 
historical, considers it not impossible that S. Paul may have been for- 
mally brought before the Court. He notices that in later days it assumed 



i2o RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

The biases philosophers, who probably yawned over 
their own lectures, hearing of a new lay preacher, 
eager to teach and apparently convinced of the truth 
of what he said, thought the novelty too delicious to 
be neglected, and brought him forthwith out of the 
chatter and bustle of the crowd, probably past the 
very orchestra where Anaxagoras's books had been 
proselytising before him, and where the stiff old 
heroes of Athenian history stood, a monument of the 
escape from political slavery. It is even possible that 
the curious knot of idlers did not bring him higher 
than this platform, which might well be called part of 
Mars' Hill. But if they chose to bring him to the top, 
there was no hindrance, for the venerable Court held 
its sittings in the open air, on stone seats j and when 
not thus occupied, the top of the rock may well have 
been a convenient place of retirement for people who 
did not want to be disturbed by new acquaintances, 
and the constant eddies of new gossip in the market- 
place. 

It is, however, of far less import to know on what 
spot of the Areopagus Paul stood, than to understand 
clearly what he said, and how he sought to conciliate 

a general direction not only of literature, but of morals, and that any new 
teacher might fairly have been summoned before it to expound his views. 
This does not seem to me to agree with the ironical and trivial character 
of the whole audience, as described by the historian. The author of the 
work called Supernatural Religion, when analysing, in his third volume, 
the Acts of the Apostles, is actually silent on this speech, though he 
discusses at great length the speeches of S. Paul which he thinks com- 
posed as parallels to those of S. Peter. Most German critics look on the 
passage as introduced by the author, like the speeches in Thucydides or 
Tacitus, — a literary ornament, rather than an exposition of the Apostolic 
preaching of the early Church. They also note its many contrasts to 
the teaching of such documents as the Epistle to the Romans. I have 
assumed, as even Renan does, that the Apostle told Timothy, or Luke, 
or some other follower, the main purport of this memorable visit, and 
also the headings of the speech- which is too unlike his received writings 
to be a probable forgery. 



v ATHENS— THE AREOPAGUS 121 

as well as to refute the philosophers who, no doubt, 
looked down upon him as an intellectual inferior. He 
starts naturally enough from the extraordinary crowd 
of votive statues and offerings, for which Athens was 
remarkable above all other cities of Greece. He says, 
with a touch of irony, that he finds them very religious 
indeed, 1 so religious that he even found an altar to a 
God professedly unknown^ or perhaps unknowable. 2 
Probably S. Paul meant to pass from the latter sense 
of the word ayj/wcrros, which was, I fancy, what the 
inscription meant, to the former, which gave him an 
excellent introduction to his argument. Even the use 
of the singular may have been an intentional variation 
from the strict text, for Pausanias twice over speaks of 
altars to the gods, who are called the ayvtocn-01 (or 
mysterious), but I cannot find any citation of the 
inscription in the singular form. However that may 
be, our version does not preserve the neatness of b. 
Paul's point: C I find an altar,' he says, c to an un- 
known God. Whom then ye unknowingly worship, 
Him declare I unto you.' But then he develops a 
conception of the great One God, not at all from the 
special Jewish, but from the Stoic point of view. He 
was preaching to Epicureans and to Stoics — to the 
advocates of prudence as the means, and pleasure as 
the end, of a happy life, on the one hand ; on the 
other, to the advocates of duty, and of life in harmony 

1 The fact that the title of Menander's famous play was Aeicridai/niov 
has escaped the commentators. S. Paul must have meant ' rather super- 
stitious,' as our Authorised Version translates it. 

2 Though &yvuaros may surely have this meaning, I do not find it 
suggested in any of the commentaries on the passage. They all suppose 
some superstitious precaution, or else some case of the real inscription 
being effaced by time, and supplied in this way. The expression in 
Pausanias — the gods called unknown, tois 6vo/uLa^o/j.^uois a-yvucrois — 
seems to suggest it as a regular title, and we know that there were 
deities whose name was secret, and might not be pronounced. But in 
the face of so many critics I will not insist upon this interpretation. 



122 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

with the Providence which governs the world for 
good. There could be no doubt to which side the 
man of Tarsus must incline. Though the Stoics of 
the market-place at Athens might be mere dilettanti, 
mere talkers about the dyaOov, and the great soul of 
the world, we know that this system of philosophy- 
produced at Tarsus as well as at Rome the most 
splendid constancy, the most heroic endurance — I had 
almost said the most Christian benevolence. It was 
this stern and earnest theory which attracted all serious 
minds in the decay of heathenism. 

Accordingly, S. Paul makes no secret of his 
sympathy with its nobler features. He describes the 
God whom he preaches as the benevolent Author of 
the beauty and fruitfulness of Nature, the great 
Benefactor of mankind by His providence, and not 
without constant and impressive witnesses of His 
greatness and His goodness. But he goes much 
further, and treads close upon the Stoic pantheism 
when he not only asserts, in the words of Aratus, 
that we are His offspring, but that c in Him we live, 
and move, and have our being.' 

His first conclusion, that the Godhead should not 
be worshipped or even represented in stone or in 
bronze, was no doubt quite in accordance with more 
enlightened Athenian philosophy But when he 
proceeded to preach the Resurrection of the Dead, 
then even those who were attracted by him, and 
sympathised with him, turned away in contempt. 
The Epicureans thought death the end of all things. 
The Stoics thought that the human soul, the off- 
spring — nay, rather an offshoot — of the Divine 
world-soul, would be absorbed into its parent essence. 
Neither could believe the assertion of S. Paul. When 
they first heard him talk of Jesus and Anastasis 
they thought them some new pair of Oriental deities. 



v ATHENS— THE AREOPAGUS 123 

But when they learned that Jesus was a man ordained 
by God to judge the world, and that Anastasis was 
merely the Anastasis of the dead, they were greatly 
disappointed ; so some mocked, and the rest excused 
themselves from further listening. 

Thus ended, to all appearance ignominiously, the 
first heralding of the faith which was to supplant all 
the temples and altars and statues with which Athens 
had earned its renown as a beautiful city, which was 
to overthrow the schools of the sneering philosophers, 
and even to remodel all the society and the policy of 
the world. And yet, in spite of this great and 
decisive triumph of Christianity, there was something 
curiously prophetic in the contemptuous rejection of 
its apostle at Athens. Was it not the first expre;sion 
of the feeling which still possesses the visitor who 
wanders through its ruins, and which still dominates 
the educated world ? — the feeling that while other 
cities owe to the triumph of Christianity all their 
beauty and their interest, Athens has to this day 
resisted its influence ; and that while the Christian 
monuments of Athens would elsewhere excite no 
small attention, here they are passed by as of no 
import compared with its heathen splendour. 1 There 

1 This depends on no mere accident, but on the essential features of 
the spiritual side of Greek character, on which I will quote an admirable 
passage from Renan's S. Paul : — 

* Ce qui caracterisait la religion du Grec autrefois, ce qui la carac- 
terise encore de nos jours, c'est le manque d'infini, de vague, d'atten- 
drissement, de mollesse feminine j la profondeur du sentiment religieux 
allemand et celtique manque a la race des vrais Hellenes. La piete du 
Grec orthodoxe consiste en pratiques et en signes exterieurs. Les 
eglises orthodoxes, parfois tres-elegantes, n'ont rien des terreurs qu'on 
ressent dans une eglise gothique. En ce christianisme oriental, point de 
larmes, de prieres, de componction interieure. Les enterrements y 
sont presque gais ; ils ont lieu le soir, au soleil couchant, quand les 
ombres sont deja longues, avec des chants a mi-voix et un deploiement 
de couleurs voyantes. La gravite fanatique des Latins deplait a ces 
races vives, sereines, legeres. L'infirme n'y est pas abattu : il voit 



124 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

are very old and very beautiful little churches in 
Athens, c ces delicieuses petites eglises byzantines,'" 

doucement venir la mort ; tout sourit autour de lui. La est le secret 
de cette gaiete divine des poemes homeriques et de Platon : le recit de 
la mort de Socrate dans le Phedon montre a peine une teinte de tris- 
tesse. La vie, c'est donner sa fleur, puis son fruit j quoi de plus ? Si, 
comme on peut le soutenir, la preoccupation de la mort est le trait le 
plus important du christianisme et du sentiment religieux moderne, la 
race grecque est la moins religieuse des races. C'est une race super- 
ficielle, prenant la vie comme une chose sans surnaturel ni arriere-plan. 
Une telle simplicity de conception tient en grande partie au climat, a 
la purete de l'air, a l'etonnante joie qu'on respire, mais bien plus encore 
aux instincts de la race hellenique, adorablement idealiste. Un rien, 
un arbre, une fleur, un lezard, une tortue, provoquant le souvenir de 
mille metamorphoses chantees par les poetes ; un filet d'eau, un petit 
creux dans le rocher, qu'on qualifie d'antre des nymphes j un puits avec 
une tasse sur la margelle, un pertuis de mer si etroit que les papillons 
le traversent et pourtant navigable aux plus grands vaisseaux, comme a 
Poros ; des orangers, des cypres dont l'ombre s'etend sur la mer, un 
petit bois de pins au milieu des rochers, suffisent en Grece pour produire 
le contentement qu'eveille la beaute. Se promener dans les jardins pen- 
dant la nuit, ecouter les cigales, s'asseoir au clair de lune en jouant de 
la flute ; aller boire de l'eau dans la montagne, apporter avec soi un 
petit pain, un poisson et un lecythe de vin qu'on boit en chantant 5 aux 
fetes de famille, suspendre une couronne de feuillage au-dessus de sa 
porte, aller avec des cbapeaux de fleurs ; les jours de fetes publiques, porter 
des thyrses garnis de feuillages ; passer des journees a danser, a jouer 
avec des chevres apprivoisees — voila les plaisirs grecs, plaisirs d'une race 
pauvre, econome, eternellement jeune, habitant un pays charmant, trou- 
vant son bien en elle-meme et dans les dons que les dieux lui ont faits. 
La pastorale a la facon de Theocrite fut dans les pays helleniques une 
verite j la Grece se plut toujours a. ce petit genre de poesie fin et 
aimable, l'un des plus caracteristiques de sa litterature, miroir de sa 
propre vie, presque partout ailleurs niais et factice. La belle humeur, 
la joie de vivre sont les choses grecques par excellence. Cette race a 
toujours vingt ans : pour elle, indulgere genio n'est' pas la pesante ivresse 
de l'Anglais, le grossier ebattement du Francais 5 c'est tout simplement 
penser que la nature est bonne, qu'on peut et qu'on doit y ceder. Pour 
le Grec, en effet, la nature est une conseillere d'elegance, une maitresse 
de droiture et de vertu ; la " concupiscence," cette idee que la nature 
nous induit a mal faire, est un non-sens pour lui. Le gout de la parure 
qui distingue le palicare, et qui se montre avec tant d'innocence dans la 
jeune Grecque, n'est pas la pompeuse vanite du barbare, la sotte pre- 
tention de la bourgeoise, bouffie de son ridicule orgueil de parvenue j 
c'est le sentiment pur et fin de nai'fs jouvenceaux, se sentant fils legi- 
times de« vrais inventeurs de la beaute. 



v ATHENS— THE AREOPAGUS 125 

as M. Renan calls them. They are very peculiar, 
and unlike what one generally sees in Europe. They 

' Une telle race, on le comprend, eut accueilli Jdsus par un sourire. 
II 6tait une chose que ces enfants exquis ne pouvaient nous apprendre : 
le serieux profond, l'honnetete simple, le denouement sans gloire, la 
bonte sans emphase. Socrate est un moraliste de premier ordre : mais 
il n'a rien a faire dans l'histoire religieuse. Le Grec nous parait tou- 
jours un peu sec et sans coeur : il a de l'esprit, du mouvement, de la 
subtilite ; il n'a rien de reveur, de melancolique. Nous autres, Celtes 
et Germains, la source de notre genie, c'est notre coeur. Au fond de 
nous est comme une fontaine de fees, une fontaine claire, verte et pro- 
fonde, 011 se reflete l'infini. Chez le Grec, l'amour propre, la vanity se 
melent a tout $ le sentiment vague lui est inconnu j la reflexion sur sa 
propre destinde lui parait fade. Poussee a la caricature, une facon si 
incomplete d 'entendre la vie donne a l'epoque romaine le graculus 
esurient, grammairien, artiste, charlatan, acrobate, medecin, amuseur 
du monde entier, fort analogue a l'ltalien des xvi* et xvn« siecles : a 
l'epoque byzantine, le theologien sophiste faisant d£g6n6rer la religion 
en subtiles disputes j de nos jours, le Grec moderne, quelquefois vaniteux 
et ingrat, le papas orthodoxe, avec sa religion egoi'ste et mat6rielle. 
Malheur a qui s'arrete a cette decadence ! Honte a celui qui, devant le 
Parthenon, songe a remarquer un ridicule ! II faut le reconnaitre pour- 
tant : la Grece ne fut jamais se>ieusement chr6tienne j elle ne Test pas 
encore. Aucune race ne fut moins romantique, plus d£nu£e du senti- 
ment chevaleresque de notre moyen age. Platon batit toute sa thdorie 
de la beaut6 en se passant de la femme. Penser a une femme pour 
s'exciter a faire de grandes choses ! un Grec eut 6t6 bien surpris d'un 
pareil langage $ il pensait, lui, aux hommes r£unis sur V agora, il pensait 
a la patrie. Sous ce rapport, les Latins 6taient plus pres de nous. La 
po£sie grecque, incomparable dans les grands genres tels que l'dpopde, 
la tragedie, la podsie lyrique desinteress^e, n'avait pas, ce semble, la 
douce note el£giaque de Tibulle, de Virgile, de Lucrece, note si bien 
en harmonie avec nos sentiments, si voisine de ce que nous aimons. 

* La m&me difference se retrouve entre la piete de saint Bernard, de 
saint Francois d'Assise et celle des saints de l'Eglise grecque. Ces 
belles £coles de Cappadoce, de Syrie, d'Egypte, des Peres du2 desert, 
sont presque des ecoles philosophiques. L'hagiographie populaire des 
Grecs est plus mythologique que celle des Latins. La plupart des saints 
qui figurent dans l'iconostase d'une maison grecque et devant lesqucls 
brule une lampe ne sont pas de grands fondateurs, de grands hommes, 
comme les saints de l'Occident j ce sont souvent des etres fantastiques, 
d'anciens dieux transfigures, ou du moins des combinaisons de person- 
nages historiques et de mythologie, comme saint Georges. Et cette 
admirable eglise de Sainte-Sophie ! c'est un temple arien j le genre 
humain tout entier pourrait y iaire sa priere. N'ayant pas eu de pape, 
d'inquisition, de scolastique, de moyen age barbare, ayant toujours gard6 



126 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

strike the observer with their quaintness and small- 
ness, and he fancies he here sees the tiny model of 
that unique and gorgeous building, the cathedral of 
S. Mark at Venice. But yet it is surprising how 
little we notice them at Athens. I was even told — 
I sincerely hope it was false — that public opinion at 
Athens was gravitating towards the total removal of 
one, and that the most perfect, of these churches, 
which stands in the middle of a main street, and so 
breaks the regularity of the modern boulevard ! 1 

I have now concluded a review of the most 
important old Greek buildings to be seen about 
Athens. To treat them exhaustively would require 
a far longer discussion ; and there are, moreover, 
smaller buildings, like the so-called Lantern of 
Demosthenes, which is really the Choragic monument 
of Lysicrates, and the Temple of the Winds, which 
are well worth a visit, but which the traveller can 
find without a guide, and study without difficulty. 

un levain d'arianisme, la Grece lachera plus facilement qu'aucun autre 
pays le christianisme surnaturel, a peu pres comme ces Atheniens 
d'autrefois etaient en meme temps, grace a une sorte de legerete, mille 
fois plus protonde que le serieux de nos lourdes races, le plus super- 
stitieux des peuples et le plus voisin du rationalisme. Les chants popu- 
lates grecs sont encore aujourd'hui pleins d 'images et d'idees palennes. 
A la grande difference de l'Occident, l'Orient garda durant tout le 
moyen age et jusqu'aux temps modernes de vrais "hellenistes," au fond 
plus pai'ens que chretiens, vivants du culte de la vieille patrie grecque 
et des vieux auteurs. Ces hellenistes sont, au xv* siecle, les agents de 
la renaissance de l'Occident, auquel ils apportent les textes grecs, base 
de toute civilisation. Le meme esprit a preside et presidera aux des- 
tinees de la Grece nouvelle. Quand on a bien etudie ce qui fait de 
nos jours le fond d'un Hellene cultive, on voit qu'il y a chez lui tres-peu 
de christianisme : il est chretien de forme, comme un Persan est musul- 
man j mais au fond il est " helleniste." Sa religion, c'est l'adoration 
de l'ancien genie grec. II pardonne toute heresie au philhellene, a celui 
qui admire son passe ; il est bien moins disciple de Jesus et de saint 
Paul que de Plutarque et de Julien.' 

1 The reader will find in my last Chapter some further information 
concerning the remains of mediaeval Greece. 



v ATHENS— CONCLUSION 127 

But incompleteness must be an unavoidable defect in 
describing any city in which new discoveries are 
being made, I may say, monthly, and where the 
museums and excavations of to-day may be any day 
completely eclipsed by materials now unknown, or 
scattered through the country. Thus, on my second 
visit to Athens, I found in the National Bank the 
wonderful treasures exhumed by Dr. Schliemann at 
Mycenae, which are in themselves enough to induce 
any student of Greek antiquity to revisit the town, 
however well he may have examined it in former 
years. On my third visit, they were arranged and 
catalogued, but we have not yet attained to any 
certainty about the race that left them there, and how 
remote the antiquity of the men that possessed them. 
These considerations will vindicate the inadequateness 
of this review in the eyes of the exacting reader, who 
may have expected a more thorough survey. 



CHAPTER VI 

EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA COLONUS THE HARBOURS 

LAURIUM SUNIUM 

There are two modern towns which, in natural 
features, resemble Athens. The irregular ridge of 
greater Acropolis and lesser Areopagus remind one of 
the castle and the Monchsberg of Salzburg, one of the 
few towns in Europe more beautifully situated than 
Athens. The relation of the Acropolis to the more 
lofty Lvcabettus suggests the castle of Edinburgh 
and Arthur's Seat. But here the advantage is greatly 
on the side of Athens. 

When you stand on the Acropolis and look round 
upon Attica, a great part of its history becomes 
immediately unravelled and clear. You see at once 
that you are in the principal plain of the country, 
surrounded with chains of mountains in such a way 
that it is easy to understand the old stories of wars 
with Eleusis, or with Marathon, or with anv of the 
outlying valleys. Looking inland on the north side, 
as you stand beside the Erechtheum, vou see straight 
before you, at a distance of some ten miles, Mount 
Pentelicus, from which all the splendid marble was 
once carried to the rock around you. This Pentelicus 
is a sort of intermediate cross-chain between two 
main lines which diverge from either side of it, and 
gradually widen so as to form the plain of Athens. 

128 



chap, vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 129 

The left or north-western chain is Mount Parnes ; 
the right or eastern is Mount Hymettus. This 
latter, however, is only the inner margin of a large 
mountainous tract which spreads all over the rest of 
South Attica down to the Cape of Sunium. There 
are, of course, little valleys, and two or three villages, 
one of them the old deme Brauron, which they now 
pronounce Vravron. There is the town of Thorikos, 
near the mines of Laurium ; there are two modern 
villages called Marcopoulos ; but on the whole, both 
in ancient and modern times, this south-eastern part 
of Attica, beyond Hymettus, was, with the exception 
of Laurium, of little moment. There is a gap 
between Pentelicus and Hymettus, nearly due north, 
through which the way leads out to Marathon ; and 
you can see where the bandits surprised in 1870 
the unfortunate gentlemen who fell victims to the 
vacillation and incompetence of people in power at 
that time. There is also a gap between Pentelicus 
and Parnes, the saddle of Upper Attica, to which you 
can now penetrate by Kephissia, and on to Tatoi, the 
king's country seat. 

On the left side of Pentelicus you see the chain of 
Parnes, which stretches down all the north-west side 
of Attica, till it runs into the sea as Mount Cory- 
dallus, opposite to the island of Salamis. In this long 
chain of Parnes (which can only be avoided by going 
up to the northern coast near Oropus, and passing 
into Boeotia not far from the sea x ) there are three 
passes or lower points, one far to the north — that 
by Tatoi (Dekelea), and this is the line of the new 
railway, where of old Alcibiades planted the Spartan 
garrison which tormented and ruined the farmers of 
Attica. This pass leads you out to Tanagra in 
Boeotia. Next to the south, some miles nearer, is 

1 This is the line of the present railway to Thebes. 

K 



130 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

the even more famous Pass of Phyle, from which 
Thrasybulus and his brave fellows recovered Athens 
and its liberty. This pass, when you reach its 
summit, looks into the northern point of the Thriasian 
plain, and also into the wilder regions of Cithaeron, 
which border Boeotia. The third pass, and the 
lowest — but a few miles beyond the groves of 
Academe — is the Pass of Daphne, which was the high 
road to Eleusis, along which the sacred processions 
passed in the times of the Mysteries ; and in this pass 
you still see the numerous niches in which votive 
tablets had been set by the worshippers at a famous 
temple of Aphrodite. 

On this side of Attica also, with the exception of 
the Thriasian plain and of Eleusis, there extends out- 
side Alount Parnes a wild mountainous district, quite 
alpine in character, which severs Attica from Bceotia, 
not by a single row of mountains, or by a single pass, 
but by a succession of glens and denies, which at once 
explain to the classical student, when he sees them, 
how necessary and fundamental were the divisions of 
Greece into its separate districts, and how completely 
different in character the inhabitants of each were 
sure to be. The way from Attica into Boeotia was 
no ordinary high road, nor even a pass over one 
mountain, but through a series of glens and valleys 
and defiles, at any of which a hostile army could be 
stopped, and each of which severed the country on 
either side by a difficult obstacle. This truly alpine 
nature of Greece, only felt when we see it, must be 
kept before the mind in estimating the character and 
energy of the race. But let us return to our view 
from the Acropolis. 

If we turn and look southward, we see a broken 
country, with several low hills between us and the 
sea — hills tolerably well cultivated, and when I saw 



vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 131 

them in May, all coloured with golden stubbles, for 
the corn had just been reaped. But the plain in every 
direction seems dry and dusty ; arid, too, and not rich 
alluvial soil, like the plains of Bceotia. Then Thucy- 
dides's words come back to us, when he says Attica 
was 'undisturbed on account of the lightness of its 
soil ' (ao-rao-tao-Tos odcra Sta to Ae7rroy€a>v), as early 
invaders preferred richer pastures. This reflection of 
Thucydides applies equally to the mountains of Attica 
round Athens, which are not covered with rich grass 
and dense shrubs, like Helicon, like Parnassus, like the 
glades of Arcadia, but seem so bare that we wonder 
where the bees of Hymettus can find food for their 
famous honey. It is only when the traveller ascends 
the rocky slopes of the mountain that he finds its 
rugged surface carpeted with myriads of little wild 
flowers, too insignificant to give the slightest colour 
to the mountain, but sufficient for the bees, which are 
still making their honey as of old. This honey of 
Hymettus, which was our daily food at Athens, is 
now not very remarkable either for colour or flavour. 
It is very dark, and not by any means so good as the 
honey produced in other parts of Greece — not to say 
on the heather hills of Scotland and Ireland. I tasted 
honey at Thebes and at Corinth, which was much 
better, especially that of Corinth made in the hills 
towards Cleonae, where the whole country is scented 
with thyme, and where thousands of bees are buzzing 
eagerly through the summer air. When the old 
Athenians are found talking so much about honey, 
we must not forget that sugar was unknown to them, 
and that all their sweetmeats defended upon honey 
exclusively. Hence the culture and use of it assumed 
an importance not easily understood among moderns, 
who are in possession of sugar-cane and of beetroot. 
But amid all the dusty and bare features of the 



132 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

view, the eye fastens with delight on one great broad 
band of dark green, which, starting from the west side 
of Pentelicus, close to Mount Parnes in the north, 
sweeps straight down the valley, passing about two 
miles to the west of Athens, and reaching to the 
Peiraeus. This is the plain of the Kephissus, and 
these are the famous olive woods which contain the 
deme Colonus, so celebrated by Sophocles, and the 
groves of Academe, at their nearest point to the city. 
The dust of Athens, and the bareness of the plain, 
make all walks about the town disagreeable, save 
either the ascent of Lycabettus, or a ramble into these 
olive woods. The river Kephissus, which waters 
them, is a respectable, though narrow river, even in 
summer often discharging a good deal of water, but 
much divided into trenches and arms, which are very 
convenient for irrigation. 1 So there is a strip of 
country, fully ten miles long, and perhaps two wide 
on the average, which affords delicious shade and 
greenness and the song of birds, instead of hot sunlight 
and dust and the shrill clamour of the tettix without. 
This cool retreat is now being invaded by the growth 
of Athens towards the west (1905). 

In former days I have wandered many hours in 
these delightful woods, listening to the nightingales, 
which sing all day in the deep shade and solitude, as it 
were in a prolonged twilight, and hearing the plane- 
tree whispering to the elm, 2 as Aristophanes has it, 
and seeing the white poplar show its silvery leaves in 
the breeze, and wondering whether the huge old olive 

1 I have seen it very full in June ; I have also seen it almost dry in 
April, so that it depends upon the season whether the traveller will 
enjoy the coolness of the river, or turn with disappointment from its 
stony bed. 

2 On a fine summer's day, in the meadows about Eton, I was struck 
with the truth of this phrase. A light breeze was making all the 
poplars shiver beside the great elms, which stood in silence. 



vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 133 

stems, so like the old pollarded stumps in Windsor 
Forest, could be the actual sacred trees, the poptai, 
under which the youth of Athens ran their races. 
The banks of the Kephissus, too, were lined with 
great reeds, and sedgy marsh plants, which stooped 
over into its sandy shallows and waved idly in the 
current of its stream. The ouzel and the kingfisher 
started from under one's feet, and bright fish moved 
out lazily from their sunny bay into the deeper pool. 
Now and then through a vista the Acropolis shows 
itself in a framework of green foliage, nor do I know 
any more enchanting view of that great ruin. 

All the ground under the dense olive-trees was 
covered with standing corn, for here, as in Southern 
Italy, the shade of trees seems no hindrance to the 
ripening of the ear. But there was here thicker wood 
than in Italian corn-fields ; on the other hand, there 
was not that rich festooning of vines which spread 
from tree to tree, and which give a Neapolitan summer 
landscape so peculiar a charm. A few homesteads there 
were along the roads, and even at one of the bridges a 
children's school, full of those beautiful fair children 
whose heads remind one so strongly of the old Greek 
statues. But all the houses were walled in, and many 
of them seemed solitary and deserted. The memories 
of rapine and violence were still there. I was told, 
indeed, that no country in Europe was so secure, and 
I confess I found it so myself in my wanderings j but 
when we see how every disturbance or war on the 
frontier revives again the rumour of brigandage, I 
could not help feeling that the desert state of the land, 
and the general sense of insecurity, however irrational 
in the intervals of peace, were not surprising. 

There is no other excursion in the immediate 
vicinity of Athens of like beauty or interest. The 
older buildings in the Peiraeus are completely gone. 



i 3 4 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

No trace of the docks or the delgma remains ; and the 
splendid walls, built as Thucydides tells us with cut 
stone, without mortar or mud, and fastened with 
clamps of iron fixed with lead — this splendid structure 
has been almost completely destroyed. We can find, 
indeed, elsewhere in Attica — at Phyle — still better at 
Eleutherae — specimens of this sort of building, but at 
the Peiraeus there are only foundations remaining. 
Yet it is not really true that the great wall surround- 
ing the Peiraeus has totally disappeared. Even at the 
mouth of the harbour single stones may be seen lying 
along the rocky edge of the water, of which the size 
and the square cutting prove the use for which they were 
originally intended. But if the visitor to the Peiraeus 
will take the trouble to cross the hill, and walk round the 
harbour of Munychia, he will find on the eastern point 
of the headland a neat little cafe, with comfortable 
seats, and with a beautiful view. The coast all round 
this headland shows the bed of the surrounding sea 
wall, hewn in the live rock. The actual structure is 
preserved in patches on the western point of this har- 
bour, where the coast is very steep ; but in the place 
to which I refer, we can trace the whole course of 
the wall a few feet above the water, cut out in the 
solid rock. I know no scanty specimen of Athenian 
work which gives a greater idea of the enormous 
wealth and energy of the city. The port of 
Munychia had its own theatre and temples, and it 
was here that Pausanias saw the altar to the gods called 
the unknown. The traces of the sea wall cease as soon 
as it reaches the actual narrow mouth of the little 
harbour. I do not know how far towards Phalerum 
it can be traced, but when visiting the harbour called 
Zea x on another occasion, I did not observe it. 

1 This was the military harbour, at least in the fourth century b.c., 
when the architect Philo built a famous arsenal (aKevodrjKrj) at its 



vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 135 

The striking feature in the present Peiraeus, which 
from the entrance of the harbour is very picturesque, 
is undoubtedly the rapid growth and extension of 
factories, with English machinery and overseers. 
When last there I found fourteen of these establish- 
ments, and their chimneys were becoming quite a 
normal feature in Greek landscape. Those which I 
visited were working up the cotton and the wool or 
the country into calico and other stuffs, which are 
unfortunately coming into fashion among the poorer 
classes, and ousting the old costume. I was informed 
that boys were actually forbidden to attend school in 
Greek dress, a regulation which astonishes any one 
who knows the beauty and dignity of the national 
costume. 

A drive to the open roadstead of Phalerum is more 
repaying. Here it is interesting to observe how the 
Athenians passed by the nearest sea, and even an open 
and clear roadstead, in order to join their city to the 
better harbour and more defensible headland of Peiraeus. 
Phalerum, as they now call it, though they spell it 
with an 77, is the favourite bathing-place of modern 
Athens, with an open-air theatre, and is about a mile 
and a half nearer the city than Peiraeus. The water 
is shallow, and the beach is of fine sand, so that for 
ancient ships, which I suppose drew little water, it 
was a convenient landing-place, especially for the dis- 
embarking of troops, who could choose their place 
anywhere around a large crescent, and actually land 
fighting, if necessary. But the walls of Athens, the 
long walls to Peiraeus, and its lofty fortifications, 
made this roadstead of no use to the enemy, so long 
as Athens held the command of the sea, and could 

north-east corner, of which the plan and even details have been re- 
constructed by Dr. DCrpfeld from an important inscription recovered is 
1881. 



136 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

send out ships from the secure little harbours of 
Zea and Munychia, which are on the east side and 
in the centre of the headland of Peiraeus. There was 
originally another wall, to the east side of the Phaleric 
bay, but this was early abandoned when the second 
long wall, or middle wall, as it was at first called, was 
completed. 

At the opening of the Peloponnesian war it appears 
that the Athenians defended against the Lacedaemonians, 
not the two long walls which ran close together and 
parallel to Peiraeus, but the northern of these, and the 
far diverging Phaleric wall. It cannot but strike any 
observer as extraordinary how the Athenians should 
undertake such an enormous task. Had the enemy 
attacked anywhere suddenly and with vigour, it seems 
hard to understand how they could have kept him out. 
According to Thucydides's detail x the wall to Phalerum 
was nearly four miles, that to Peiraeus four and a half. 
There were in addition five miles of city wall, and 
nearly three of Peiraeus wall. That is to say, there 
were about seventeen miles of wall to be protected. 
This is not all. The circuit was not closed, but separ- 
ated by about a mile of beach between Peiraeus and 
Phalerum, so that the defenders of the two extremities 
could in no way promptly assist each other. Thucydides 
tells us that a garrison of 16,000 inferior soldiers, old 
men, boys, and metics, sufficed to do this work. We 
are forced to conclude that not only were the means of 
attacking walls curiously incomplete, but even the dash 
and enterprise of modern warfare cannot have been 
understood by the Greeks. For we never hear of even 

1 Thucydides, followed by modern historians, has nevertheless been 
inaccurate in his use of the expression Long Walls. He sometimes means 
the north and the Phaleric wall, sometimes the north and south parallel 
walls, to the exclusion of the Phaleric wall. The long walls rebuilt by 
Conon were the latter pair, and thus not the same long walls as were 
finished in 456 b.c. 



vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 137 

a bold attempt on this absurdly straggling fortification, 
far less of any successful attempt to force it. 

But it is time that we should leave the environs of 
Athens, 1 and wander out beyond the borders of the 
Athenian plain into the wilder parts of the land. Attica 
is, after all, a large country, if one does not apply 
railway measures to it. We think thirty miles by 
rail very little, but thirty miles by road is a long 
distance, and implies land enough to support a large 
population, and to maintain many flourishing towns. 
We can wander thirty miles from Athens through 
Attica in several directions — to Eleutherae, on the 
western or Boeotian frontier ; to Oropus, on the north ; 
and Sunium, on the south. Thus it is only when we 
endeavour to know Attica minutely that we find how 
much there is to be seen, and how long a time is 
required to see it. And fortunately enough there is an 
expedition, and that not the least important, where we 
can avoid the rough paths and rougher saddles of the 
country, and coast in a steamer along a district at all 
times obscure in history, and seldom known for anything 
except for being the road to Sunium. Strabo gives a 
list of the demes along this seaboard, 2 and seems only 
able to tell one fact about them — a line from an old 
oracle in the days of the Persian war, which prophesied 
that c the women of Colias will roast their corn with 
oars,' 8 alluding to the wrecks driven on shore here by 
the north-west wind from Salamis. Even the numerous 
little islands along this coast were in his day, as they 

1 The reader who desires to see the best poetical picture of modern 
Athens should consult the tenth chapter in Mr. Symonds's Sketches in 
Italy and Greece — one of the most beautiful productions of that charming 
poet in prose. 

a ix. § i. p. 244. 

8 He reads, however, <ppl^ov<ri, instead of Herodotus's <pptji-ov<ri. The 
reader will note, however, that Strabo was not writing from autopsy. 
I am convinced he had never visited Athens. 



138 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

now are, perfectly barren. Yet with all its desolation 
it is exceedingly picturesque and varied in outline. 

We took ship in the little steamer 1 belonging to 
the Sunium Mining Company, who have built a 
village called Ergasteria, between Thorikos and the 
promontory, and who were obliging enough to allow 
us to sail in the boat intended for their private traffic. 
We left the Peiraeus on one of those peculiarly Greek 
mornings, with a blue sky and very bright sun, but 
with an east wind so strong and clear, so Aaprpos, as 
the old Greeks would say, that the sea was driven into 
long white crests, and the fishing-boats were lying 
over under their sails. These fresh and strong winds, 
which are constantly blowing in Greece, save the 
people from some of the bad effects of a very hot 
southern climate. Even when the temperature is high, 
the weather is seldom sultry ; and upon the sea, which 
intrudes everywhere, one can always find a cool and 
refreshing atmosphere. The Greeks seem not the 
least to fear these high winds, which are generally 
steady, and seldom turn to squalls. The smallest 
boats are to be seen scudding along on great journeys 
from one island to another — often with a single 
occupant, who sits holding the helm with one hand 
and the stern sheet with the other. All the ferry-boats 
in the Peiraeus are managed in this way, and you may 
see their great sails, like seagulls' wings, leaning over 
in the gale, and the spray dashing from the vessel's 
prow. We met a few larger vessels coming up from 
Syra, but on the whole the sea was well-nigh as desert 
as the coast ; so much so, that the faithful dog, which 
was on board each of those boats, thought it his serious 
duty to stand up on the tanrail and bark at us as a 
strange and doubtful company. 

So, after passing many natural harbours and spacious 

1 There is now a railway from Athens to the mines. 



vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 139 

bays, many rocky headlands and bluff islands — but 
all desert and abandoned by track of man, we 
approached the famous cape, from which the white 
pillars of the old temple gleamed brilliantly in the sun. 
They were the first and only white marble pillars 
which I saw in Greece. Elsewhere, dust and age, if 
not the hand of man, have coloured that splendid 
material with a dull golden hue; but here the sea 
breeze, while eating away much of the surface, has not 
soiled them with its fresh brine, and so they still remain 
of the colour which they had when they were set up. 
We should fain conjecture that for once, at all events, 
the Greeks had not applied the usual blue and red to 
decorate this marvellous temple ; that — for the delight 
and benefit of the sailors, who hailed it from afar, as 
the first sign of Attica — its brilliant white colour was 
preserved, to render it a brighter beacon and a clearer 
object in twilight and in mist. I will not yet describe 
it, for we paid it a special visit, and must speak of it in 
greater detail ; but even now, when we coasted round 
the headland, and looked up to its shining pillars, 
standing far aloft into the sky, it created the most 
intense interest. It was easy, indeed, to see how 
Byron's poetic mind was here inspired with some of 
his noblest lines. 

When we turned from it seaward, we saw stretched 
out in echelon that chain of Cyclades, which are but a 
prolongation of the headland — Keos, Kyphnos, Seri- 
phos, Siphnos, and in the far distance, Melos — Melos, 
the scene of Athens's violence and cruelty, when she 
filled up, in the mind of the old historian, the full 
measure of her iniquity. And as we turned north- 
ward, the long island, or islet, of Helena, which 
stretches along the point, like Hydra off that of 
Argolis, could not hide from us the mountain ranges 
of Eubcea, still touched here and there with snow. A 



140 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

short run against the wind brought us to the port of 
Ergasteria, marked very strangely in the landscape by 
the smoke of its chimneys — the port where the pro- 
duce of the mines of Laurium was being prepared and 
shipped for Scotland. 

Here, at last, we found ourselves again among 
men ; 3000 operatives, many of them with families, 
make quite a busy town of Ergasteria. And I could 
not but contrast their bold and independent looks, 
rough and savage as they seemed, with what must 
have been the appearance of the droves of slaves who 
worked the mines in old days. We were rowed 
ashore from our steamer by two men called Aristides 
and Epaminondas, but I cannot say that their looks 
betokened either the justice of the one or the culture 
of the other. 

We found ourselves when we landed in an awk- 
ward predicament. The last English engineer re- 
maining to the Mining Company, at whose invita- 
tion we had ventured into this wild district, had 
suddenly left, that morning, for Athens. His house 
was shut up, and we were left friendless and alone, 
among 3000 of these Aristideses and Epaminondases, 
whose appearance was anything but reassuring. We 
did what we could to meet the difficulty, and it turned 
out very well indeed. We went to the temporary 
director of the mines, a very polished gentleman, with 
a charming wife, both of whom spoke French ex- 
cellently. We stated our case, and requested hospi- 
tality for the night. Nothing could be more friendly 
than our reception. This benevolent man and his 
wife took us into their own house, prepared rooms for 
us, and promised to let us see all the curiosities of the 
country. Thus our misfortune became, in fact, a 
very good fortune. The night, however, it must be 
confessed, was spent in a very unequal conflict with 



vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 141 

mosquitoes — an inconvenience which our good hostess 
in vain endeavoured to obviate by giving us a strong- 
smelling powder to burn in our room, shutting all the 
windows. But had the remedy been even successful, 
it is very doubtful whether it was not worse than the 
disease. 

We started in the morning by a special train — for 
the Company have a private line from the coast up to 
the mines — to ascend the wooded and hilly country 
into the region so celebrated of old as one of the main 
sources of Athenian wealth. As the train wound its 
way round the somewhat steep ascent, our prospect 
over the sea and its islands became larger and more 
varied. The wild rocks and forests of southern 
Eubcea — one of the few districts in Greece which 
seem to have been as savage and deserted in old days 
as they are now — detached themselves from the inter- 
vening island of Helena. We were told that wild 
boars were still to be found in Eubcea. In the hills 
about Laurium, hares, which Xenophon so loved to 
hunt in his Elean retreat, and turtle doves, seemed 
the only game attainable. All the hills were covered 
with stunted underwood. 

The mines of Laurium appear very suddenly in 
Attic history, but from that time onward are a promi- 
nent part of the wealth of the Athenians. We know 
that in Solon's day there was great scarcity of money, 
and that he was obliged to depreciate the value of the 
coinage — a very violent and unprecedented measure, 
never repeated ; for, all through later history, Attic 
silver was so good that it circulated at a premium 
in foreign parts just as English money does now. 
Accordingly, in Solon's time we hear no mention 
of this great and almost inexhaustible source of 
national wealth. All through the reign of the Peisis- 
tratids there is a like silence. But when we hear that 



i 4 2 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Peisistratus was possessed of great wealth, ' both from 
Attica, and from the mines of Thrace ' (over against 
Thasos), we may infer that he worked Laurium 
for his own profit, but kept his profits secret. The 
fact that the mines were and remained the property 
of the State implies that on the expulsion of the tyrants 
they were taken over by the Democratic government. 
Suddenly, after the liberation of Athens, we hear of 
Themistocles persuading the people to apply the very 
large revenue from these mines to the building of a 
fleet for the purpose of the war with iEgina. 1 The 
tract of Xenophon On the Attic Revenues — a tract 
which is almost altogether about these mines — asserts 
indeed that they had been worked from remote 
antiquity ; and there can be little doubt that here, 
as elsewhere in Greece, the Phoenicians had been 
the forerunners of the natives in the art of mining. 
Here, as in Thasos, I believe the Phoenicians had 
their settlements ; and possibly a closer survey of the 
great underground passages, which are still there, may 
give us some proof by inscriptions or otherwise. 2 

But what happened after the Semitic traders had 

1 The earliest allusion to them is a line in ./Eschylus's Persa, where 
they come in so peculiarly, and without any natural suggestion, that 
they must have been in his day a new and surprising source of wealth. 
Atossa is inquiring of the chorus about Athens, and whether it possesses 
any considerable wealth. The chorus replies (v. 238) : — ■ 

apytipov Tnjy/j tis atirdis fori, dr)<ravpbs x^ ov ^. 

This inference of mine, made years ago, is now strongly confirmed by 
the recovered Polity of the Athenians, which says (chap, xxii.) : ' In the 
archonship of Nicodemus [484-3 B.C.], when the mines at Maroneia 
[as he calls them] were discovered (icpdurj), and there was a profit of 
100 talents from the work, Themistocles,' etc. Modern writers now 
speak of the matter as obvious. They used to call it a random con- 
jecture of mine, in the first edition of this book. 

2 This has not been confirmed by recent researches, though a flood of 
light has been thrown on the working of the mines by M. Ardaillon in 
hk excellent monograph. 



vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 143 

been expelled from Greek waters ? — for expelled they 
were, though, perhaps, far later from some remote and 
unexplored points than we usually imagine. I suppose 
that when this took place, Athens was by no means 
in a condition to think about prosecuting trade at 
Sunium. Salamis, which was far closer, and a more 
obvious possession, was only conquered in Solon's day, 
after a long and tedious struggle ; and I am perfectly 
certain that the Athenians could have had no power 
to hold an outlying dependency, separated by thirty 
miles of the roughest mountain country, when they 
had not subdued an island scarcely a mile from the 
Thriasian plain and not ten miles from Athens. I 
take it, then, that the so-called (tvvolkkt[xo^ or unifying 
of Athens, in prehistoric times, by Theseus, or who- 
ever did it, was not a cementing of all Attica, includ- 
ing these remote corners, but only of the settlements 
about the plains of Attica, Marathon, and Eleusis ; 
and that the southern end of the peninsula was not 
included in the Athens of early days. It was, in fact, 
only accessible by a carefully constructed artificial 
road, such as we hear of afterwards, or by sea. The 
Athenians had not either of these means of access at 
so early a period. And it is not a little remarkable 
that the first mention of their ownership of the silver 
mines is associated with the building of a fleet to 
contend with iEgina. I have no doubt that Themis- 
tocles's advice has been preserved without his reasons 
for it. He persuaded the Athenians to surrender their 
surplus revenue from Laurium, to build ships against 
the i^ginetans, simply because they found that with- 
out ships the iEginetans would be practically sole 
possessors of the mines. They were far closer to 
Laurium by sea than Athens was by land — closer, 
indeed, in every way — and I am led to suspect that, 
in the days before Solon, the mines may have been 



144 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

secretly worked by iEgina, and not by Athens. I 
cannot here enter into my full reasons, but I fancy 
that Peisistratus and his sons — not by conquest, but 
by some agreement — got practical possession of the 
mines, and were, perhaps, the first to make all Attica 
really subject to the power of Athens. 1 But no 
sooner are they expelled, than the iEginetans renew 
their attacks or claims on Laurium ; and it is only 
the Athenian fleet which secures to Athens its 
possession. We hear of proceedings of Hippias about 
coinage, 2 which are adduced by Aristotle as specimens 
of injustice, or sharp practice, and which may have 
something to do with the acquisition of the silver 
mines by his dynasty. But I must cut short this 
serious dissertation. 

Our special train brought us up slowly round 
wooded heights, and through rich green brakes, into 
a lonely country, from which glimpses of the sea 
could, however, still be had, and glimpses of blue 
islands, between the hills. And so we came to the 
settlements of the modern miners. The great Com- 
pany, whose guests we were, had been started some 
years ago, by French and Italian speculators, and 
Professor Ansted had been there as geologist for 
some years. But the jealousy of the Greeks, when 
they found out that profit was rewarding foreign 
enterprise, caused legislation against the Company ; 
various complications followed, so that at last they 
gladly sold their interest to a native Company. In 
1887 this Company was still thriving; and I saw 
in the harbour a large vessel from Glasgow, which 

1 It is possible that in the days of Eretria's greatness, when she ruled 
over a number of the Cyclades, Eretrians may have worked the mines. 
These occupants probably preceded the ^ginetans. But the strange 
thing is, that the mines and their large profits appear suddenly, and as a 
novelty, at a particular point of Greek history. 

a Arist. CEcon. 11. 4. 



vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 145 

had come to carry the lead to Scotland, when pre- 
pared in blocks — all the produce being still bought by 
a single English firm. 

When the Greeks discuss these negotiations about 
the mines they put quite a different colour on the 
affair. They say that the French and Italians desired 
to evade fair payment for the ground-rent of the 
mines, trusting to the strength of their respective 
governments, and the weakness of Greece. The 
Company's policy is described in Greece as an over- 
reaching, unscrupulous attempt to make great profits 
by sharp bargains with the natives, who did not 
know the value of their property. A great number 
of obscure details are adduced in favour of their 
arguments, and it seemed to me that the Greeks were 
really convinced of their truth. In such a matter it 
would be unfair to decide without stating both sides ; 
and I am quite prepared to change my present con- 
viction that the Greeks were most to blame, if proper 
reasons can be assigned. But the legislative Acts 
passed in their Parliament look very ugly indeed at 
first sight. 

The principal Laurium Company 1 never enter the 
mines at all, but gather the great mass of scoriae, 
which the old Athenians threw out after smelting 
with more imperfect furnaces and less heat than ours. 
These scoriae, which look like stone cinders, have 
been so long there that some vegetation has at last 
grown over them, and the traveller does not suspect 
that all the soil around was raised and altered by the 
hand of man. Owing to the power of steam, and 
their railway, the present miners carry down the 
scoriae on trucks to the sea-coast, to Ergasteria, and 
there smelt them. The old Athenians had their 

1 Since I visited the place there are actually five companies — two 
Greek and three French, established to work the district. 



146 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

furnaces in the middle of the mountains, where many 
of them are still to be seen. They sought chiefly for 
silver, whereas the modern Company are chiefly in 
pursuit of lead, and obtain but little silver from the 
scoriae. 

In many places you come upon the openings of 
the old pits, which went far into the bowels of the 
mountains, through miles of underground galleries 
and passages. Our engine-driver — an intelligent 
Frenchman — stopped the train to show us one of 
these entrances, which went down almost straight, 
with good steps still remaining, into the earth. He 
assured us that the other extremity which was known, 
all the passages being open, was some two or three 
miles distant, at a spot which he showed us from a 
hill. Hearing that inscriptions were found in these 
pits, and especially that the name of Nicias had been 
discovered there, we were very anxious to descend 
and inspect them. This was promised to us, for the 
actual pits were in the hands of another Greek Com- 
pany, who were searching for new veins of silver. 
But when we arrived at the spot the officers of 
the Company were unwilling to let us into the pits. 
The proper overseer was away — intentionally, of 
course. There were no proper candles; there were 
no means of obtaining admission : so we were baulked 
in our inquiry. But we went far enough into the 
mouth of one of them to see that these pits were well 
and carefully made ; and, I suppose, had we gone far 
enough, we should have found the old supports, of 
which the Athenian law was so careful. 

The quantity of scorias thrown out, which seems 
now perfectly inexhaustible, is in itself sufficient 
evidence not of the enormous scale on which but 
of the many centuries during which the old mining 
was carried on. We know of little enterprises by 



vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 147 

single owners. But we also hear that Nicias hired 
out 1000 slaves to work in the mines, and that the 
profits accruing to the State from the fines or head- 
rents of the mines were very large — on a moderate 
estimate, ^8000 a year of our money, which meant 
in those days a great deal more. 

The author of the tract on c Athenian Revenue' 
says that the riches of the mines were absolutely 
unbounded ; that only a small part of the silver 
district had been worked out, though the digging 
had gone on from time immemorial ; and that after 
innumerable labourers had been employed, the mines 
always appeared equally rich, so that no limit need be 
put on the employment of capital. Still he speaks of 
opening a new shaft as a most risky speculation. 
His general estimate appears, however, somewhat 
exaggerated. The writer confesses that the number 
of labourers was in his day diminishing, and the 
majority of the proprietors were then beginners ; so 
that there must have been great interruption of work 
during the Peloponnesian War. In the age of Philip 
there were loud complaints that the speculations in 
mining were unsuccessful ; and for obtaining silver, 
at all events, no reasonable prospect seems to have 
been left. In the first century of our era, Strabo 
(ix. i. 23) says that these once celebrated mines were 
exhausted, 1 that new mining did not pay, and thus 
people were smelting the poorer ore, and the scoriae, 
from which the ancients had imperfectly separated the 
metal. He adds that the main product of the mining 
district was in his day honey, which was especially 
known as smokeless (ai<airvio-Tov\ on account of its 
good preparation. This in itself shows that the 

1 There is also a quotation in Strabo (iii. 3, § 9), from Demetrius Phal. 
implying their activity in the third century b.c. Plutarch (de defectu or. 
43) speaks of them as having lately failed. 



148 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

mining had decayed, for now all flowers in the neigh- 
bourhood of the smelting are killed by the black 
fumes. 

Our last mention of the place in olden times is 
that of Pausanias (at the end of the second century 
a.d.), who speaks of Laurium, with the addition, 
that it had once been the seat of the Athenian silver 
mines ! 

There is one more point suggested by these mines, 
which it is not well to pass over when we are con- 
sidering the working of them in ancient times. 
Nothing is more poisonous than the smoke from lead- 
mines ; and for this reason the people at Ergasteria 
have built a chimney more than a mile long to the 
top of a neighbouring hill, where the smoke escapes. 
Even so, when the wind blows back the smoke, all 
the vegetation about the village is at once blighted, 
and there is no greater difficulty than to keep a 
garden within two or three miles of this chimney. 
As the Athenians did not take such precautions, we 
are not surprised to hear from them frequent notices 
of the unhealthiness of the district. What then must 
have been the condition of the gangs of slaves which 
Nicias and other respectable and pious Athenians kept 
in these mines ? Two or three allusions give us a 
hideous insight into this great social sore, which has not 
been laid bare, because the wild district of Laurium, 
and the deep mines under its surface, have concealed 
the facts from the ordinary observer. Nicias, we are 
told, let out 1000 slaves to Sosias the Thracian, at an 
obolus a day each — the lessee being bound to restore 
them to him the same in number. 

The meaning of this frightful contract is only too 
plain. The yearly rent paid for each slave was about 
half the full price paid for him in the market. It 
follows, that if the slave lived for three years, Nicias 



vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 149 

made a profit of 50 per cent on his outlay. No doubt, 
some part of this extraordinary bargain must be ex- 
plained by the great profits which an experienced 
miner could make — a fact supported by the tract on the 
Revenues, which dates about fifty years later than the 
bargain of Nicias. The lessee, too, was under the 
additional risk of the slaves escaping in time of war, 
when a hostile army might make a special invasion 
into the mountain district for the purpose of inflicting 
a blow on this important part of Athenian revenue. 
In such cases, it may be presumed that desperate 
attempts were made by the slaves to escape, for 
although the Athenian slaves generally were the best 
treated in Greece, and had many holidays, it was very 
different with the gangs employed by the Thracian 
taskmaster. We are told that they had 360 working 
days in the year. This, together with the poison of 
the atmosphere, tells its tale plainly enough. We 
now know also from the researches published by M. 
Ardaillon that the shafts and galleries, though carefully 
cut, were very narrow in dimensions, and some of them 
over 300 feet under the surface, so that the ventilation 
must have been very bad. He has explained what 
means were taken to ventilate the galleries, and they 
were very practical, but no modern mine would be 
tolerated under such conditions. 

And yet Nicias, the capitalist who worked this 
hideous trade, was the most pious and God-fearing 
man at Athens. So high was his reputation for in- 
tegrity and religion, that the people insisted on appoint- 
ing him again and again to commands for which he 
was wholly unfit ; and when at last he ruined the 
great Athenian army before Syracuse, and lost his own 
life, by his extreme devoutness, and his faith in the 
threats and warnings of the gods — even then the great 
sceptical historian, who cared for none of these things, 



r5o RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

condones all his blunders out of regard for his piety 
and his great respectability. 

Of course, however, an excursion to Laurium, 
interesting as it might be, were absurd without visit- 
ing the far more famous Sunium, — the promontory 
which had already delighted us on our sea voyage 
round the point, — the temple which Byron has again 
hallowed with his immortal verse, and Turner with 
his hardly less immortal pencil. So we hired horses 
on our return from the mines, and set out on a very 
fine afternoon to ride down some seven or eight miles 
from Ergasteria to the famous promontory. Our 
route led over rolling hills, covered with arbutus and 
stunted firs ; along valleys choked with deep, matted 
grass ; by the side of the sea, upon the narrow ledge 
of broken rocks. Nowhere was there a road, or a 
vestige of human habitation, save where the telegraph 
wire dipped into the sea, pointing the way to the dis- 
tant Syra. It was late in the day, and the sun was 
getting low, so we urged our horses to a canter wher- 
ever the ground would permit it. But neither the 
heat nor the pace could conquer the indefatigable 
esquire who attended us on foot to show us the way, 
and hold the horses when we stopped. His speed and 
endurance made me think of Phidippides and his run 
to Sparta ; nor, indeed, do any of the feats recorded of 
the old Greeks, either in swimming or running, appear 
incredible when we witness the feats that are being 
performed almost every day by modern muscle and 
endurance. At last, after a delightful two hours' 
roaming through the homely solitude, we found our- 
selves at the foot of the last hill, and over us the 
shining pillars of the ruined temple stood out against 
the sky. 

There can be no doubt that the temple of Poseidon 
on Mount Taenarum must have occupied quite as fine 



vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 151 

a position, but the earthquakes of Laconia have made 
havoc of its treasures, while at Sunium, — though some 
of the drums in the shafts of the pillars have been 
actually displaced several inches from their fellows 
above and below, so that the perfect fitting of the old 
Athenians has come to look like the tottering work of 
a giant child with marble bricks, — in spite of this, 
thirteen pillars remain, 1 a piece of architrave, and a 
huge platform of solid blocks ; above all, a site not 
desecrated by modern habitations, where we can sit 
and think of the great old days, and of the men who 
set up this noble monument at the remotest corner of 
their land. The Greeks told us that this temple, that 
at iEgina, and the Parthenon, are placed exactly at the 
angles of a great equilateral triangle, with each side 
about twenty-five or thirty miles long. Our maps do 
not verify this belief. The distance from Athens to 
Sunium appears much longer than either of the other 
lines, nor do we find in antiquity any hint that such a 
principle was attended to, or that any peculiar virtue 
was attached to it. 

We found the platform nearly complete, built with 
great square blocks of poros-stone, and in some places 
very high, though in others scarcely raised at all, 
according to the requirements of the ground. Over 
it the temple was built, not with the huge blocks 
which we see at Corinth and in the Parthenon, but 
still of marble, and with that beautifully close fitting, 
without mortar, rubble, or cement, which characterises 
the best and most perfect epoch of Greek architecture. 2 
The earthquake, which has displaced the drums in the 

1 Byron, who loved this spot above all others, I think, in Greece, 
speaks of sixteen as still standing in his clay. 

8 Dr. Dorpfeld has since shown that the marble temple at Sunium 
was built on the site of an older temple, with a very slight but distinct 
enlargement of the plan. The older temple was of the ordinary poros- 
stone found on the site. 



152 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap, 

middle of the pillars, has tumbled over many large 
pieces, which can be seen from above scattered all 
down the slope where they have rolled. But enough 
still remains for us to see the plan, and imagine the 
effect of the whole structure. It is the usual simple, 
grand Doric style, but lighter in proportions than the 
older Attic temples ; and, being meant for distant 
effect, was probably not much decorated. Its very 
site gives it all the ornament any building could pos- 
sibly require. 

It was our good fortune to see it in a splendid 
sunset, with the sea a sheet of molten gold, and all 
the headlands and islands sleeping in hazy purple. 
The mountains of Eubcea, with their promontory of 
Geraestus, closed the view upon the north-east j but 
from it far down into the iEgean reached island after 
island, as it were striving to prolong a highway to the 
holy Delos. The ancient Andros, Tenos, Myconos 
were there, but the eye sought in vain for the home 
of Apollo's shrine — the smallest and yet the greatest 
of the group. The parallel chain, reaching down from 
Sunium itself, was confused into one mass, but left 
exposed to view the distant Melos. Then came a 
short space of open sea, due south, which alone pre- 
vented us from imagining ourselves on some fair and 
quiet inland lake ; and beyond to the south-west we 
saw the point of Hydra, the only spot in all Hellas 
whose recent fame exceeds the report of ancient days. 
The mountains of Argolis lay behind iEgina, and 
formed, with their Arcadian neighbours, a solid back- 
ground, till the eye wandered round to the Acropolis 
of Corinth, hardly visible in the burning brightness of 
the sun's decline. And all this splendid expanse of sea 
and mountain, and bay and cliff, seemed as utterly 
deserted as the wildest western coast of Scotland or of 
Ireland. One or two little white sails, speeding in his 



vi EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 153 

boat some lonely fisherman, made the solitude, if 
possible, more speaking and more intense. There are 
finer views, more extensive, and perhaps even more 
varied, but none more exquisitely interesting and more 
melancholy to the student of Ancient Greece. 



CHAPTER VII 

EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA PENTELICUS MARATHON 

DAPHNE ELEUSIS 

This great loneliness is a feature that strikes the 
traveller almost everywhere through the land. Many 
centuries of insecurity, and indeed of violence, had 
made country life almost impossible ; and now that 
better times have come, the love and knowledge of it 
are gone. The city Athenian no longer grumbles, as 
he did in Aristophanes's day, that an invasion has driven 
him in from the rude plenty and simple luxuries of 
his farming life, where with his figs and his olives, his 
raisins and his heady wine, he made holiday before his 
gods, and roasted his thrush and his chestnuts with 
his neighbour over the fire. All this is gone. There 
is not extinct, indeed, the old political lounger, the 
loafer of the market-place, ever seeking to obtain 
some shabby maintenance by sycophancy or by threats. 
This type is not hard to find in modern Athens, but 
the old sturdy Acharnian, as well as the rich horse- 
breeding Alcmaeonid, are things of the past. Even 
the large profits to be made by market-gardening will 
not tempt them to adopt this industry, and the great 
city of Athens is one of the worst supplied and dearest 
of capitals, most of its daily requirements in vegetables, 
fowls, eggs, etc., coming in by steamers from islands 

iS4 



chap, vii EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 155 

on the coast of Thessaly. 1 No part of the country of 
Attica can be considered even moderately cultivated, 
except the Thriasian plain, and the valley of Kephissus, 
reaching from near Dekelea to the sea. This latter 
plain, with its fine olive-woods reaching down across 
Academus to the region of the old long walls, is fairly 
covered with corn and grazing cattle, with plane trees 
and poplars. But even here many of the homesteads 
were deserted ; and the country seats of the Athenians 
were often left empty for years, whenever a band of 
brigands appeared in the neighbouring mountains. 
Of late there is a steady improvement. 

Nothing can be truer than the admirable descrip- 
tion of Northern Attica given in M. Perrot's book 
on the Attic orators. He is describing Rhamnus, 
the home of Antiphon, but his picture is of broader 
application. 2 

1 I trust that this statement, true some years ago, may soon become 
obsolete. 

2 ' Aujourd'hui tout ce district est presque desert j seuls, quelques 
arch6ologues et quelques artistes affrontent ces gorges pierreuses et ces 
scabreux sentiers ; on prend alors ce chemin pour aller de Marathon a 
Chalcis et revenir a Athenes par D6c61ie, entre le Pentelique et Parnes. 
Ces monuments de Rhamnunte offrent des traits curieux qui les rendent 
interessants pour le voyageur erudit ; mais de plus les mines memes et 
le site ont assez de beaut6 pour dedommager de leur peine ceux qui 
recherchent surtout le pittoresque. Je n'oublierai jamais les quelques 
heures que j'ai passees la, il y a d£ja longtemps, par une radieuse 
matinee d'avril. Pendant que nous examinions ce qui restait des 
anciens sanctuaires et de leurs defenses, notre guide songeait au de- 
jeuner ; il avait achete un agneau a l'un de ces patres appelds Vlaques 
qui, avec leurs brebis et leurs chevres ^parses dans les buissons de 
myrtes et de lentisques, sont a peu pres les seuls habitants de ce 
canton. Quand nous revinmes, l'agneau, soutenu sur deux fourches 
fichees en terre par un jeune pin sylvestre qui servait de broche, cuisait 
tout entier devant un feu clair, et la graisse coulait a grosses gouttes sur 
les charbons ardents. Devant notre tapis etendu a l'ombre avait £t£ 
pr£par£e une jonch£e de verts branchages sur lesquels le succulent 
rflti, rapidement decoupd par le coutelas d'un berger, laissa bientot 
tomber cotelettes et gigots. 

* Ce qui nous fit prolonger la notre halte aprea que notre appetit fut 



i 5 6 



RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 



All these remarks are even more strongly exempli- 
fied by the beautiful country which lies between 
Pentelicus and Hymettus, and which is now covered 
with forest and brushwood. We passed through this 
vale one sunny morning, on our way to visit Marathon. 
There is, indeed, a road for some miles — the road to 

satisfait, ce fut la vue magnifique dont on jouissait de la plate-forme ou 
nous 6tions dtablis, dans un coin de l'acropole. A nos pieds, c'etait la 
mer, veloutee de chatoyants reflets par le soleil, par la brise, par les 
nuages qui passaient au ciel. En face de nous se dressaient les hautes 
et severes cotes de l'Eubee, domines par la pyramide du Dirphys. Ce 
fier 8ommet etait encore tout blanc des neiges de l'hiver ; au contraire, 
si nous nous retournons vers les gorges qui se creusaient autour de nous 
dans la montagne, entre des parois de marbre rougies et comme halves 
par le soleil, c'etait le printemps de la Grece dans tout son epanouisse- 
ment et son eclat. Dans le fond des ravins, la ou un peu d'eau filtrait 
sous les cailloux, arbres de Judee et cytises melaient leurs brillantes 
couleurs au tendre feuillage des platanes, et sur les pentes les plus 
apres des milliers de genets en fleur etincelaient parmi la verdure des 
genevriers, des chenes et des oliviers francs. 

' Dans l'antiquit6, toute cette portion du territoire ath£nien, qui faisait 
partie de ce que Ton appelait la Diakria ou le " haut pays," sans avoir 
de gros villages ni une population aussi dense que celle des plaines 
d'Athenes ou d'Eleusis, devait pourtant presenter un aspect assez 
different de celui qu'elle offre aujourd'hui ; je me la represente assez 
semblable a ce que sont maintenant certains districts montueux de la 
Grece moderne ou le d£sir d'eviter le contact des Turcs avait rejete et 
cantonn6 les Hellenes : il en etait ainsi du Magne, de la Tzaconie, des 
environs de Karytena en Arcadie. Partout la, une industrieuse perse- 
verance a mis a profit tout ce que pouvaient offrir de ressources le sol et 
le climat. Sur des pentes abruptes et presque verticales, de petits 
murs en pierres seches s'effbrcent de retenir une mince couche de terre 
v£getale j malgre ces precautions, les grandes pluies de l'hiver et les 
vents de l'dte en emportent une partie jusqu'au fond de la valine ; sans 
jamais se lasser, hommes, femmes, enfants, travaillent sans relache a 
reparer ces degats. Que de fois, admirant la patience de ces sobres et 
tenaces montagnards, je les ai suivis des yeux pendant qu'ils allaient 
ainsi lentement, le dos courbe sous leurs hottes pleines, gravissant des 
sentiers sablonneux ou d'etroits escaliers taill6s ^i meme la roche qui 
leur renvoyait touts les ardeurs du soleil ! Au bout de quelques 
annees, il n'est pas peut-etre une parcelle du terrain dans chacun de ces 
petits champs qui n'ait fait plusieurs fois le voyage, qui n'ait gliss6 
jusqu'au borcl du torrent pour etre ensuite ramenee pellet^e par pelletee, 
sur une des terrasses superieures. Ces sacrifices sont recompenses. Le 
long du ruisseau, la ou les cotes s'ecartent et laissent entre elles un 



vii EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 157 

the quarries of Pentelicus — but a very different one 
from what the Athenians must have had. It is now a 
mere broad track, cut by wheels and hoofs in the 
sward ; and wherever the ruts become too deep, the 
driver turns aside and makes a parallel track for his 
own convenience. 1 In summer days, the dust produced 

peu d'espace, l'eau, soigneusement mdnagde, mesur£e par heures et par 
minutes a chaque proprietaire, court bruyante et claire dans les rigoles ; 
elle arrose des vergers ou croissent, suivant les lieux, soit l'oranger, le 
citronnier et le grenadier, soit les arbres de nos climats temp£res, le 
pe'cher, le pommier et le poirier ; a leur ombre grossissent la feve et 
l'£norme courge. Plus haut, sur les versants les moins roides et les 
moins pierreux, la ou la legere charrue invented par Triptoleme a 
trouv6 assez de place pour tracer le sillon, l'orge et le seigle verdissent 
au printemps, et, dans les bonnes annees, profitent pour murir des 
tardifs soleils d'automne. Ce qui d'ailleurs reussit le mieux dans ces 
montagnes, ce qui paye vraiment les habitants de leurs peines, c'est 
l'olivier, dont les puissantes racines dtreignent le roc et semblent faire 
corps avec lui ; c'est la vigne, qui, d'etage en etage, grimpe presque 
jusqu'aux sommets. A l'un et a l'autre, pour donner une huile et un 
vin qui seraient les plus savoureux du monde, s'ils 6taient mieux 
pr6paf6s, il suffit de beaucoup de soleil, d'un peu de terre et de quelques 
coups de hoyau qui viennent a propos ameublir le sol et le degager des 
plante8 parasites. 

' C'est ainsi que dans l'Attique, au temps de sa prosperity, m£me les 
cantons aujourd'hui les plus deserts et les plus st£riles devaient etre 
habit£s et cultiv£s. Sur beaucoup de ces croupes ou le roc affleure 
presque partout, ou verdit a peine, aux premiers jours du printemps, 
une herbe courte, diapree d'anemones et de cistes, qui jaunira des le 
mois de mai, il y avait jadis une couche plus epaisse de terre veg6tale. 
Dans les ravins, la ou j'ai perdu plus d'une fois mon chemin en pour- 
suivant la perdrix rouge ou la b£casse a travers des maquis touffus, on a, 
pendant bien des siecles, fait la vendange et la cueillette des olives j 
c'est ce dont temoignent, sur les pentes les mieux exposees aux rayons 
du midi ou du couchant, des restes de murs et de terrassements que l'on 
distingue encore dans l'epaisseur du fourre. Dans les endroits ou la 
culture 6tait a peu pres impossible, des bois de pins, aujourd'hui presque 
entierement ddtruits, empechaient la montagne de se d£nuder ; dans les 
clairieres et entre les rocs memes poussaient la sauge, la campanule et le 
thym, toutes ces plantes aromatiques, tous ces vigoureux arbustes que 
se plait a tondre la dent des moutons et des chevres.' 

1 I have not travelled this road lately, and possibly it may have been 
improved, but I grieve to say that my recent visit (1^905) showed very 
little progress in this essential condition of civilisation. Except where 
tome generous donor had paid for a good road, little had been done. 



158 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

by this sort of road is something beyond descrip- 
tion ; and the soil being very red earth, we have an 
atmosphere which accounts to some extent for the 
remarkable colour of the old buildings of Athens. 
The way, after turning round the steep Lycabettus, 
which, like Arthur's Seat at Edinburgh, commands 
the town, passes up the east side of the undulating 
plain of Attica, with the stony but variegated slopes 
of Hymettus upon the right, and Pentelicus almost 
straight ahead. As soon as the suburbs are passed we 
meet but one or two country seats, surrounded with 
dark cypress and pepper trees ; but outside the sombre 
green is a tall, dazzling, white wall, which gives a 
peculiarly Oriental character to the landscape. There 
is cultivation visible when you look to the westward, 
where the village of Kephissia lies among the groves 
which accompany the Kephissus on its course -, l but 
up towards Pentelicus, along the track which must 
once have been crowded with carts, and heavy teams, 
and shouting drivers, when all the blocks of the 
Parthenon were being hurried from their quarry to 
adorn the Acropolis — along this famous track there 
is hardly a sign of culture. Occasionally, a rough 
stubble field showed that a little corn had been cut 
— an occasional station, with a couple of soldiers, 
shows why more had not been sown. The fear of 
brigands had paralysed industry, and even driven out 
the scanty rural population. 

It strikes me, when speaking of this road, that the 
Greek roads cannot have been at all so well constructed 
as the Roman, many of which are still to be seen in 
England. Though I went upon the track of many 

1 M. Carapanos and some other rich Athenians have charming villas 
in this cool and green country, which is reached in about 40 minutes 
from Athens by rail, and which is now a favourite summer resort, with 

a comfortable hotel in the village. 



vii EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 159 

of them, I but seldom noticed the vestige of an old 
Greek road. There are many places on the road to 
Eleusis, where we see how the old sacred way was 
cut out of the neighbouring rock on its north side. 
There are here and there wretched remains of Turkish 
roads — rough angular stones laid down across the hills, 
in a close irregular pavement ; but of the great builders 
of the Parthenon and of Phyle, of Eleutherae and of 
Eleusis, hardly a patch of road- work has, so far as I 
know, remained. 

There is, indeed, one exception in this very 
neighbourhood, to which we may now naturally turn. 
The traveller who has wondered at the huge blocks of 
the Propylaea and the Parthenon, and who has noticed 
the exquisite quality of the stone, and the perfect 
smoothness which it has preserved to the present day, 
will naturally desire to visit the quarry on Pentelicus 
from which it was brought. The marble of Paros is 
probably the only stone superior to it for the purposes 
of sculpture. It is, however, harder, and of larger 
grain, so that it must have been more difficult to 
work. Experts can tell the difference between the 
two marbles, but I confess that, though M. Rouso- 
poulos endeavoured to teach it to me from specimens 
in the Acropolis Museum, I was unable to attain a 
clear perception. The large blocks of Pentelican 
marble, however beautiful and fine in grain, seem not 
unfrequently to have contained flaws, and possibly the 
ascertaining of this defect may of old have been one 
of the most difficult duties of the architect. It is 
supposed to have been done by sounding the block 
with a hammer, a process which the Greeks would 
call KU)8(Dvi(eLv. There are at present, close to the east 
front of the Parthenon, several of these rejected blocks, 
and the lapse of ages has brought out the flaw visibly, 
because damp has had time to penetrate the stone, and 



160 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

stain its pure whiteness with a dark seam. But when 
it came fresh from its native bed, and was all pure 
white, I presume the difficulty must have been con- 
siderable. Possibly these blocks on the Parthenon 
were injured in their transit, and left the quarries in 
sound condition. For in going up the steep road to 
these quarries, in more than one place a similar great 
block will be found tumbled aside, and left lying at 
the very spot where we may suppose some accident to 
have happened to crack it. This road, which in its 
highest parts has never been altered, is a steep descent, 
rudely paved with transverse courses of stone, like 
steps in pattern, and may have had wooden slides laid 
over it, to bring down the product of the quarries to 
the valley. It is well worth while going up for a 
night to the fine monastery not far off, where there is 
ample shade of waving trees and plenty of falling 
water, in the midst of deep slopes wooded with fir — a 
cool and quiet retreat in the fierce heat of summer. 1 
From this place to the quarries is less than an hour's 
walk. The moderns still draw stone from them, but 
far below the spots chosen by the ancients ; and of 
course the remains of the old industry are on an 
infinitely grander scale. 

It is a laborious climb, up a road covered with small 
fragments of stone. But at last, beneath a great face 
of marble all chipped with the work of ancient hands, 
there is a large cool cavern, with water dripping from 
the roof into ice-cold pools below, and beside it a 
quaint grotto chapel, with its light still burning, and 
stone seats around, where the traveller may rest. This 
place seems to have been the main source of the old 

1 ToXXai 5' api.lv iiirepde Kara icparbs Soviovro 
atyeipoi TrreXiai re ' rb 5' eyyv9ev lepbp i58a>p 
Nvu<pav i£ dvTpoto Kareifibnevov KeXapvfe. 

Theocr. vii. 135. 



vii EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 161 

Athenian buildings. The high face of the rock above 
it is chipped, as I have said, with small and delicate 
cutting, and hangs over, as if they had removed it 
beneath, in order to bring down the higher pieces 
more easily. Of course, they could not, and probably 
if they could, would not, have blasted the stone ; and, 
so far as I know, we are not informed by what process 
they managed to loosen and bring down the great 
blocks from their sites. The surface of the rock 
testifies to the use of some small and delicate chisel. 
But whatever the process, they must have had 
machinery of which we have lost all record, for no 
amount of manual work could possibly have accom- 
plished what they did in a few years, and accomplished 
it with a delicacy which shows complete control of 
their materials. The beautifully fitted walls of the 
chamber inside the north wing of the Propylaea preserve 
an interesting piece of detail on the face of each square 
block, which is perfectly fitted to its fellows -, there 
still remains a rough knob jutting out from the centre, 
evidently the handle used for lifting the stone, and 
only to be removed when all the building was complete. 
The expenses of war and the dolours of a long siege 
caused the Propylaea to remain unfinished, and so this 
piece of construction has survived. 

The view from the top of Pentelicus is, of course, 
very striking, and those who have no time or inclina- 
tion to spend a day at Marathon itself are usually 
content with a very fine view of the bay and the 
opposite mountains of Euboea, which can thence be 
had. But it is indeed a pity, now that the country is 
quite safe, after so long a journey as that from England 
to Athens, people should turn back without completing 
the additional fifteen miles which brings them to the 
site of the great battle itself. 

As we leave the track which leads up to the 

II 



i6i RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

monastery above mentioned, the country becomes 
gradually covered with shrubs, and then with stunted 
trees — generally old fir-trees, all hacked and wounded 
for the sake of their resin, which is so painfully ob- 
trusive in Greek wine. But in one place there is, by 
way of change, a picturesque bridge over a rapid rocky- 
bedded river, which is completely hidden with rich 
flowering oleanders, and in which we found sundry 
Attic women, of the poorer class, washing their clothes. 
The woods in this place were wonderfully rich and 
scented, and the sound of the turtle-dove was heard in 
the land. Presently we came upon the thickly wooded 
corner, which was pointed out to us as the spot where 
our unfortunate countrymen were captured in 1870, 
and carried up the slopes of Pentelicus, to be sacrificed 
to the blundering of the English Minister or the 
Greek Ministry, — I could not decide which, — and 
more certainly to their own chivalry ; for while all 
the captured Greeks escaped during the pursuit, our 
English gentlemen would not break their parole. 
These men are now held by the better Greeks to be 
martyrs for the good of Greece ; for this outrage first 
forced the Government to take really vigorous measures 
for the safety of the country. The whole band were 
gradually captured and executed, till at last Takos, 
their chief, was caught in Peloponnesus, three or four 
vears ago, and hanged at Athens. So it came that I 
found the country (even in my earlier visits, '75, *jj y 
'84, '89) apparently as safe as Ireland is to a traveller, 
and we required neither escort, nor arms, nor any 
precautions whatever. 

We had, indeed, a missive from the Greek Prime 
Minister, which we presented to the Chief Police 
Officer of each town — a gentleman in the usual scarlet 
cap and white petticoats, but carrying a great dog-whip 
as the sign of his office. This custom, strange to say, 



vii EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 163 

dates from the days of Aristophanes. But the Prime 
Minister warned us that, though things were now 
safe, there was no permanent security. Any revolution 
in the neighbourhood (such, for example, as that in 
Herzegovina, which at that time had not yet broken 
out) might, he said, send over the Turkish frontier 
a number of outlaws or other fugitives, who would 
support themselves by levying blackmail on the 
peasantry, and then on travellers. We were assured 
that the Morea, which does not afford an easy escape 
into Turkey, has been for years perfectly secure, and 
I found it so in several subsequent journeys. So, then, 
any traveller desirous of seeing the Peloponnesus — 
Sparta, Olympia, Mantinea, Argos, or even Central 
Greece — may count on doing so with safety. Not 
so the visitor to Tempe and Mount Pindus. 1 The 
Professors of the University with whom I talked were, 
indeed, of a more sanguine opinion. They did not 
anticipate any recurrence of the danger : they con- 
sidered Greece one of the safest and quietest of 
countries. Moreover, in one point they all seemed 
agreed. It was perfectly certain that the presence of 
bandits would be at once known at Athens. 

So much for the safety of travelling in Greece, 
which is suggested by the melancholy fate of Mr. 
Vyner and his friends, though that event is now so 
long past. But one point more. It is both idle and 
foolish to imagine that revolvers and daggers are any 
protection against Greek bandits, should they reappear. 
They never attack where they are visible. The first 
notice given to the traveller is the sight of twenty or 

1 During M. Trikoupi's long and effective administration, brigandage 
was so thoroughly put down that, although there were plenty of brigands 
in Mount Olympus close to the frontier, it was perfectly safe to wander 
about in Northern Greece up to the vale of Tempe. Such was the state 
of things in 1889. The war of 1897 in this district of course disturbed 
all the foundations of society on the frontier. 



V 

164 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

thirty muzzles pointed at him from the covert, with a 
summons to surrender. Except, therefore, the party 
be too numerous to be so surrounded and covered, so that 
some could fight, even were others shot — except in 
such a case, arms are only an additional prize, and a 
tempting one, for the clephts. It is, indeed, very 
seldom that the carrying of arms is to be recommended 
to any traveller in any land. 

As we ascended the long saddle of country which 
lies between Pentelicus and Hymettus, we came upon 
a fine olive-wood, with the same enormous stems 
which had already excited our wonder in the groves 
of Academe. Indeed, some of the stems in this wood 
were the largest we had seen, and made us think that 
they may have been there since the days when the 
olive oil of Attica was one of its most famous products, 
and its export was even forbidden. Even then there 
were ancient stumps — /zo/nat, as they were called — 
which were sacred, and which no man who rented or 
bought the land might remove — a restriction which 
seems hard to us, but was not so in Greece, where 
corn grows freely in the shade of trees, and is even 
habitually planted in orchards. But at all events, 
these old, gnarled, hollowed stumps, with their tufts 
of branches starting from the pollard trunk, are a 
really classical feature in the country, and deserve, 
therefore, a passing notice. 

When we had got well between the mountains, a 
new scene unfolded itself. We began to see the 
famous old Euripus, with the mountains of Euboea 
over against us ; and down to the south, behind 
Hymettus, till we reach the extremity of Sunium, 
stretched a long tract of mountainous and barren 
country which never played a prominent part in 
history, but where a conical hill was pointed out to 
us as the site of the old deme Brauron. It is, indeed, 



vii EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 165 

surprising how little of Attica was ever celebrated. 
Close by the most famous city of the world are 
reaches of country which are as obscure to us as the 
wilds of Arcadia ; and we may suspect that the shep- 
herds who inhabited the </>eAAea, or rocky pastures in 
the Attic hills, were not much superior to those whom 
we now meet herding their goats in the same region. 

The plain of Marathon, as everybody knows, is a 
long crescent - shaped strip of land by the shore, 
surrounded by an amphitheatre of hills, which may be 
crossed conveniently in three places, but most easily 
towards the south-west, along the road which we 
travelled, and which leads directly to Athens. When 
the Athenians marched through this broad and easy 
passage, they found that the Persians had landed at 
the northern extremity of the plain — I suppose, be- 
cause the water was there sufficiently deep to let them 
land conveniently. Most of the shore, as you proceed 
southwards, is lined on the seaboard by swamps. The 
Greek army must have marched northwards, along 
the spurs of Pentelicus, and taken up its position near 
the north of the plain. There was evidently much 
danger that the Persians should force a passage through 
the village of Marathon, farther towards the north- 
west. Had they done this, they might have rounded 
Pentelicus, and descended the main plain of Attica, 
from the valley below Dekelea. Perhaps, however, 
this pass was then guarded by an outlying fort, or by 
some defences at Marathon itself. The site of the 
battle is absolutely fixed by the great mound, upon 
which was placed a lion, which has been carried off, 
no one knows when or whither. This mound is 
exactly an English mile from the steep slope of one 
of the hills, and about half a mile from the sea at 
present ; nor was there, when I saw it, any difficulty 
in walking right to the shore, though a river flows 



1 66 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

out there, which shows, by its sedgy banks and loft) 
reeds, a tendency to create a marshy tract in rainy 
weather. But the mound is so placed that, if it marks 
the centre of the battle, the Athenians must have 
faced nearly north ; and, if they faced the sea east- 
ward, as is commonly stated, this mound must mark 
the scene of the conflict on their left wing. 1 The 
mound is very large — I suppose thirty feet high 
— altogether of earth, so far as we could see, and 
bears traces of having been frequently ransacked in 
search of antiquities. Dr. Schliemann, its latest inves- 
tigator, could find nothing there but prehistoric flint 
weapons. 

Like almost every view in Greece, the prospect 
from this mound is full of beauty and variety — every- 
where broken outlines, everywhere patches of blue sea, 
everywhere silence and solitude. Byron is so much 
out of fashion now, and so much more talked about 
than read — though even that notice of him is fast 
disappearing — that I will venture to remind the reader 
of the splendid things he has said of Greece, and 
especially of this very plain of Marathon. He was 
carried away by his enthusiasm to fancy a great future 
possible for the country, and to believe that its 
desolation and the low condition of the inhabitants 
were simply the result of Turkish tyranny, and not of 
many natural causes, conspiring for twenty centuries. 
He paints the Greek brigand or pirate as many others 
have painted the c noble savage,' with the omission of 
all his meaner vices. But, in spite of all these faults, 
who is there that has felt as he the affecting aspects of 
this beautiful land — the tomb of ancient glory — the 

1 There has been much controversy concerning the place of this 
battle ever since Finlay began to discuss it. I think the most probable 
account, for which I am partly responsible, will be found in Mr. Bury's 
History of Greece. 



vii EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 167 

home of ancient wisdom — the mother of science, of 
art, of philosophy, of statecraft — the champion of 
liberty — the envy of the Persian and the Roman — 
the teacher, even still, of modern Europe ? It is surely 
a great loss to our generation, that the love of more 
modern poets has weaned them from the study of one 
not less great in many respects, but far greater in one at 
least — in that burning enthusiasm for a national cause, 
in that red-hot passion for liberty which, even when mis- 
applied, or wasted upon unworthy objects, is ever one of 
the noblest and most stirring instincts of higher man. 

But Byron may well be excused his raving about 
the liberty of the Greeks, for truly their old conflict at 
Marathon, where a few thousand ill-disciplined men 
repulsed a larger number of still worse disciplined 
Orientals, without any recondite tactics — perhaps even 
without any very extraordinary heroism — how is it 
that this conflict has maintained a celebrity which has 
not been equalled by any of the great battles of the 
world, from that day down to our own ? The courage 
of the Greeks, as I have elsewhere shown, 1 was not of 
the first order. Herodotus praises the Athenians in 
this very battle for being the first Greeks that dared 
to look the Persians in the face. Their generals 
all through history seem never to feel sure of victory, 
and always endeavour to harangue their soldiers into 
a fury. Instead of advising coolness, they specially 
incite to rage — opyrj 7iy>ooyxt£(o/Aei/, says one of them 
in Thucydides — as if any man not in this state would 
be sure to estimate the danger fully, and run away. 
It is, indeed, true that the ancient battles were hand 
to hand, and therefore parallel to our charges of 
bayonets, which are' said to be very seldom carried 
out by two opposing lines, as one of them almost 
always gives way before the actual collision takes 

1 Social Life in Greece, chap. i. p. 25. 



168 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

place. This must often have occurred in Greek 
battles, for, in one fought at Amphipolis, Brasidas lost 
seven men ; at a battle at Corinth, mentioned by 
Xenophon — an important battle, too — the slain 
amounted to eight j 1 and these battles were fought 
before the days when whole armies were composed of 
mercenaries, who spared one another, as Ordericus 
Vitalis says, c for the love of God, and out of good 
feeling for the fraternity of arms.' So, then, the loss 
of 192 Athenians, including some distinguished men, 
and excluding Plataeans, was rather a severe one. As 
to the loss of the Persians, I so totally disbelieve the 
Greek accounts of such things that it is better to pass 
it by in silence. 

Perhaps most readers will be astonished to hear of 
the Athenian army as undisciplined, and of the science 
of war as undeveloped, in those times. Yet I firmly 
believe this was so. The accounts of battles by almost 
all the historians are so utterly vague, and so childishly 
conventional, that it is evident these gentlemen were 
not only quite ignorant of the science of war, but 
could not easily find any one to explain it to them. 
We know that the Spartans — the most admired of all 
Greek warriors — were chiefly so admired because they 
devised the system of subordinating officers to one 
another within the same detachment, like our gradation 
from colonel to corporal. Orders were passed down 
from officer to officer, instead of being bawled out by 
a herald to a whole army. But this superiority of the 
Spartans, who were really disciplined, and went into 
battle coolly, like brave men, certainly did not extend to 

1 Xen. Hell. iv. 3, § 1. To cite a parallel in modern history : a 
writer in the Pall Mall Gazette (July 12, 1876) says: 'I witnessed a 
battle during the War of Greek Independence. It lasted three days j the 
quantity of ammunition expended was enormous, and the result was one 
man wounded ! ' 



vii EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 169 

strategy, but was merely a question of better drill. As 
soon as any real strategist met them, they were helpless. 
Thus Iphicrates, when he devised Wellington's plan 
of meeting their attacking column in line, and using 
missiles, succeeded against them, even without fire- 
arms : thus Epaminondas, when he devised Napoleon's 
plan of massing troops on a single point, while keeping 
all his enemy's line occupied, defeated them without 
any considerable struggle. As for that general's great 
battle of Mantinea, the ancient Rossbach, which seems 
really to have been introduced by some complicated 
strategical movements, we owe our partial knowledge 
to the grudging account of the soldier Xenophon. But 
both Iphicrates and Epaminondas were in the distant 
future when the battle of Marathon was being fought. 
Yet what signifies this criticism ? In spite of all 
scepticism, in spite of all contempt, the battle of 
Marathon, whether badly or well fought, and the 
troops at Marathon, whether well or ill trained, will 
ever be more famous than any other battle or army, 
however important or gigantic its dimensions. Even 
in this very war, the battles of Salamis and Plataea 
were vastly more important and more hotly contested. 
The losses were greater, the results were more enduring, 
yet thousands have heard of Marathon to whom the 
other names are unknown. So much for literary 
ability — so much for the power of talking well about 
one's deeds. Marathon was fought by Athenians ; the 
Athenians eclipsed the other Greeks as far as the other 
Greeks eclipsed the rest of the world, in literary power. 
This battle became the literary property of the city, 
hymned by poet, cited by orator, told by aged nurse, 
lisped by stammering infant ; and so it has taken its 
position, above all criticism, as one of the great decisive 
battles which assured the liberty of the West against 
Oriental despotism. 



170 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

The plain in the present day is quite bare of trees, 
and, as Colonel Leake observed, appears to have been 
so at the time of the battle, from the vague account 
of its evolutions. There were a little corn and a few 
other crops about the great tumulus \ and along the 
seashore, whither we went to bathe, there was a large 
herd of cows and oxen — a sight not very usual in 
Greece. When we rushed into the shallow blue 
water, striving to reach swimming depth, we could 
not but think of the scene when Kynasgirus and his 
companions rushed in armed to stop the embarkation 
of the Persians. On the shore, then teeming with 
ships of war, with transports, with fighting and flying 
men, there was now no sign of life, but ourselves in 
the water, and the lazy cattle and their silent herds- 
man looking upon us in wonder j for, though very 
hot, it was only May, and the modern Greek never 
thinks it safe to bathe till at least the end of June — 
in this like his Italian neighbour. There was not 
a single ship or boat in the straits ; there was no 
sign of life or of population on the coast of Eubcea. 
There was everywhere that solitude which so much 
struck Byron, as it strikes every traveller in Modern 
Greece. There was not even the child or beggar, 
with coins and pieces of pottery, who is so trouble- 
some about Italian ruins, and who has even lately 
appeared at the Parthenon, the theatre of Argos, and 
a few other places in Greece. We asked the herds- 
man for remnants of arms or pieces of money : he had 
seen such things picked up, but knew nothing of their 
value. Lord Byron tells us he was offered the pur- 
chase of the whole plain (six miles by two) for about 
^900. It would have been a fine speculation for an 
antiquary : but I am surprised, as he was, rather at 
the greatness than at the smallness of the price. The 
Greek Government might very well, even now, grant 



vii EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 171 

the fee-simple to any one who would pay the ordinary 
taxes on property, which are not, I was told, very 
heavy. But still the jealousy of the nation would not 
tolerate a foreign speculator. 

I have already spoken of the position of the pass of 
Daphne, and how it leads the traveller over the ridge 
which separates the plain of the Kephissus from the 
Thriasian plain. I have also spoken at length of the 
country about the Kephissus, with its olive-woods and 
its nightingales. When we go through the pass of 
Daphne — of its monastery I shall speak in another 
chapter — a perfectly new view opens before us. We 
see under us the Thriasian plain, well covered with 
ripening corn and other crops ; we see at the far side 
of the crescent-shaped bay the remains of Eleusis. 
Behind it, and all round to the right up to where we 
stand, is an amphitheatre of hills — the spurs of Mount 
Parnes, which from Phyle reach due south down to 
where we stand, and due west to the inland of the 
Thriasian plain, till they meet and are confounded 
with the slopes of Cithseron, which extend for miles 
away behind Eleusis. On the sea-side, to our left, 
lies the island of Salamis, so near the coast that the 
sea seems a calm inland lake, lying tortuously between 
the hills. 

Many points of Greek history become plain to us 
by this view. We see how true was the epithet 
c rocky Salamis,' for the island, though it looks very 
insignificant on our maps, contains lofty mountains, 
with very bare and rocky sides. The student of 
Greek geography in maps should note this feature. 
Thus, Ithaca on the map does not suggest the actual 
Ithaca, which from most points looks like a high and 
steep mountain standing out of the sea. We begin also 
to see how Salamis was equally convenient (as the Irish 
say) to both Megara and Attica, if we consider that 



172 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Eleusis was strictly a part of Attica. The harbour of 
the Peiraeus, for example, would be quite useless if an 
enemy were watching it from Salamis. But we also 
come to see the sense of the old legend, that Eleusis 
had originally a separate king or government from 
that of Athens, and that the two cities once carried 
on war against each other. The towns are but a 
few miles apart ; but their respective plains are so 
distinctly and completely separated by the pass of 
Daphne, that not one acre of the territory of Eleusis 
can be seen from Athens, nor of Athens from Eleusis. 
So also, lastlv, we come to feel how natural is the 
remark of Thucydides, that the population of Athens, 
when the Lacedaemonians invaded Attica, and came 
no farther than the Thriasian plain, did not feel the 
terrors of a hostile invasion, as the enemy was not in 
sight ; but when he crossed the passes, and began to 
ravage Acharnae, and the vale of Kephissus, then 
indeed, though Eleusis was just as near, and just as 
much their own, they felt the realitv of the invasion, 
and were for the first time deeply dejected. This is 
a good example of that combined farness and nearness 
which is so characteristic about the most neighbour- 
ing cities in Greece. 

The wretched modern village of Eleusis is pic- 
turesquely situated near the sea, on the old site, and 
there are still to be seen the ruins, not only of the 
famous temple of Demeter, but also of the Propylaea, 
built apparently in imitation of that of Mnesicles on 
the Acropolis at Athens, though the site of both 
temple and Propylaea are at Eleusis low, and in no 
way striking. 

These celebrated ruins are wretchedly defaced. 
Not a column or a wall is now standing, and we can 
see nothing but vast fragments of pillars and capitals, 
and a great pavement, all of white marble, along 



vn EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 173 

which the ancient wheel-tracks are distinctly visible. 
There are also underground vaults of small dimen- 
sions, which, the people tell you, were intended for 
the Mysteries. We that knew what vast crowds 
attended there would not give credence to this 
ignorant guess ; for we also knew from distinct 
evidence that the great ceremony took place in a large 
building specially constructed for the purpose. The 
necessary darkness was obtained by performing the 
more solemn rites at night ; not by going down 
beneath the surface of the earth. 

The Greek savants have at last laid open, and 
explained, the whole plan of the temple, which was 
built by Ictinus, in Pericles's time, but apparently 
restored after a destructive fire by Roman architects 
copying faithfully the ancient style. The excavators 
have shown that the shrine had strange peculiarities. 
And this is exactly what we should expect. For 
although no people adhered more closely to traditional 
forms in their architecture, no people were more 
ready to modify these forms with a view to practical 
requirements. Thus, as a rule, the cella, or inner 
chamber of the temple, contained only the statue of 
the god, and was consequently small and narrow. In 
the temple at Eleusis has been found a great inner 
chamber about 59 yards by 54, hewn out of the rock 
in the rear of the edifice, and capable of accom- 
modating a large assembly. 1 Here then it seems the 
initiated — probably those of the higher degree, epoptce 
as they were called — witnessed those services 'which 
brought them peace in this world, and a blessed hope 
for the world to come.' 

The way into the temple was adorned with two 
Propylaea — one now ascribed to Hadrian's time, 

1 So Strabo describes it, ix. i, § 12. For details consult the Guide 
Joanne for Athens (1888), p. 201, or the new edition of Baedeker (1905) 



174 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

another certainly set up by a Roman, App. Claudius 
Pulcher, in 48 B.C., after you had passed through the 
former. The great temple, raised upon a natural 
platform, looks out towards Salamis, and the narrow 
line of azure which separates it from the land. Turn- 
ing to the left as you stand at the temple front, the 
eye wanders over the rich plain of Eleusis, now dotted 
over with villages, and coloured (in April) with the 
rich brown of ploughing, and the splendid green of 
sprouting wheat. This plain had multiplied its 
wealth manyfold since I first saw it, and led us to 
hope that the peasants were waking up to the great 
market which is near them at Athens. The line of 
the old sacred way along the Thriasian plain is often 
visible, for much of the sea-coast is marshy, so the 
road was cut out in many places along the spurs of 
the rocky hill of Daphne. The present road goes 
between the curious salt-lakes (Rheitoi) and the shore 
— salt-lakes full of sea-fish, and evidently fed by great 
natural springs, for there is a perpetual strong outflow 
to the tideless sea. I know not whether this natural 
curiosity has been explained by the learned. 

It is, of course, the celebrated Mysteries — the 
Greater Eleusinia, as they were called — which give 
to the now wretched village of Eleusis, with its hope- 
less ruins, so deep an interest. This wonderful feast, 
handed down from the remotest antiquity, maintained 
its august splendour all through the greater ages of 
Greek history, down to the times of decay and trifling 
— when everything else in the country had become 
mean and contemptible. Even Cicero, who was of 
the initiated himself, a man of wide culture, and of a 
sceptical turn of mind — even Cicero speaks of it as 
the great product of the culture of Athens. c Much 
that is excellent and divine,' says he, 1 'does Athens 

1 De Legg. ii. 14, § 36. 



vii EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 175 

seem to me to have produced and added to our life, 
but nothing better than those Mysteries, by which we 
are formed and moulded from a rude and savage state 
to humanity ; and indeed in the Mysteries we per- 
ceive the real principles of life, and learn not only to 
live happily, but to die with a fairer hope.' These 
are the words of a man writing, as I have said, in the 
days of the ruin and prostration of Greece. Can we 
then wonder at the enthusiastic language of the 
Homeric Hymn, 1 of Pindar, 2 of Sophocles, 3 of Aris- 
tophanes, 4 of Plato, 5 of Isocrates, 6 of Chrysippus ? 7 
Every manner of writer — religious poet, worldly poet, 
sceptical philosopher, orator — all are of one mind about 
this, far the greatest of all the religious festivals of 
Greece. 

To what did it owe this transcendent character ? 
It was not because men here worshipped exceptional 
gods, for the worship of Demeter and Cora was old 
and widely diffused all over Greece : and there were 
other Eleusinia in various places. It was not because 
the ceremony consisted of mysteries, of hidden acts 
and words, which it was impious to reveal. For the 
habit of secret worship was practised in every state, 
where special clans were charged with the care of 
special secret services, which no man else might 
know. Nay, even within the ordinary homes of the 
Greeks there were these Mysteries. Neither was it 
because of the splendour of the feast and its appoint- 
ments, which never equalled the Panathenaea at the 
Parthenon, or the riches of Delphi, or of Olympia. 
There is only one reasonable cause, and it is that 
upon which all our serious authorities agree. The 
doctrine taught in the Mysteries was a faith which 

1 in Cer. v. 480. 2 Thren. (frag.) 8 Oed. Col. 1042. 

4 Ran. 455. * Phad. cc. 29, 30. 8 Paneg. § 6. 

7 Etym. Mag. s.v. reKeri). 



176 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

revealed hopeful things about the world to come ; and 
which — not so much as a condition, but as a conse- 
quence, of this clearer light, this higher faith — made 
them better citizens and better men. This faith was 
taught in the Mysteries through symbols, 1 through 
prayer and fasting, through wild rejoicings ; but, as 
Aristotle expressly tells us, it was reached not by 
intellectual persuasion, but by a change into a new 
moral state — in fact, by being spiritually revived. 

Here, then, we have the strangest and most striking 
analogy to our religion in the Greek mythology ; for 
here we have a higher faith publicly taught, — any 
man might present himself to be initiated, — and 
taught, not in opposition to the popular creed, but 
merely by deepening it, and showing to the ordinary 
worldling its spiritual power. The belief in the God- 
dess Demeter and her daughter, the queen of the 
nether world, was, as I have said, common all over 
Greece - f but even as nowadays we are told that there 
may be two kinds of belief of the same truths, — one 
of the head and another of the heart, — just as the 
most excellent man of the world, who believes all the 
creeds of the Church, is called an unbeliever, in 
the higher sense, by our Evangelical Christians j so the 
ordinary Greek, though he prayed and offered at the 
Temple of Demeter, was held by the initiated at the 
Mysteries to be wallowing in the mire of ignorance, 
and stumbling in the night of gloom — he was held to 
live without real light, and to die without hope, in 
wretched despair. 2 

1 There seems no doubt that some of these symbols, derived from old 
nature-worship, were very gross, and quite inconsistent with modern 
notions of religion. But even these were features hallowed and en- 
nobled by the spirit of the celebrants, whose reverence blinded their eyes, 
while lifting up their hearts. 

a In the fragments of Plutarch's De anima, there are some very striking 
passages on this subject. ' After this,' he says, evidently describing some 



vii EXCURSIONS IN ATTICA 177 

The very fact that it was not lawful to divulge the 
Mystery has prevented the many writers who knew it 
from giving us any description by which we might 
gain a clear idea of this wonderful rite. We have 
hints of various sacred vessels, of various priests known 
by special technical names ; of dramatic representa- 
tions of the rape of Cora, and of the grief of her 
mother ; of her complaints before Zeus, and the final 
reconciliation. We hear of scenes of darkness and 
fear, in which the hopeless state of the unbelievers was 
portrayed \ of light and glory, to which the convert 
attained, when at last his eyes were opened to the 
knowledge of good and evil. 

But all these things are fragmentary glimpses, as 
are also the doctrines hinted of the Unity of God, 
and of atonement by sacrifice. There remains 
nothing clear and certain, but the unanimous verdict 
as to the greatness, the majesty, and the awe of the 
services, and the great spiritual knowledge and comfort 
which they conveyed. The consciousness of guilt 
was not, indeed, first taught by them, but was felt 
generally, and felt very keenly by the Greek mind. 
These Mysteries were its Gospel of reconciliation 
with the offended gods. 

These ideas seem to have taken a deeper hold on 
mankind than to affect mere Hellenic sentiment. In 
the far-off wilds of North-Western Europe we find 
as early (or as late) as 1200 a.d. a cult of mystery 

part of the ceremony, ' there came a great light, there were shown pure 
places and meadows, with dances, and all that was splendid and holy 
to see and hear, wherein he who is now perfected by initiation, and has 
obtained freedom and remission, joins in the devotions, with his head 
crowned, in the company of pure and holy men, and beholds from thence 
the unclean uninitiated crowd of mortals in deep mire and mist, trodden 
down and crowded by each other, but in fear of death, adhering to their 
ills through want of faith in the goods beyond. Since from these you 
may clearly see that the connection of the soul with the body it a 
coercion against nature.' 

N 



178 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap.vii 

established under the name of S. Patrick's Purgatory, 
which has too many similarities to the Eleusinian for 
a chance coincidence. Here, too, the sinner, after 
fasting and purification, was laid in a dark cave, where 
he saw the horrors of hell and the delights of heaven, 
and from which he might never emerge, or emerge 
insane, if hopelessly guilty, or else in awe and delight, 
having found peace for his troubled soul. The earliest 
Latin account of this Purgatory, situated on an island 
in Lough Derg, Co. Donegal, spread so widely through 
Europe, that it is commonly supposed to have in- 
fluenced Dante in his Purgatorio ; its abuses caused 
Pope Alexander VI. to send a Cardinal thither in 
1492 ; it gave the name to a play of Calderon. The 
island, though the cave has been blocked up, and the 
ancient fane destroyed by Protestant iconoclasm, still 
gathers every summer some 4000 pilgrims, who would 
be to-day quite willing to go through the ancient 
symbolism, and seek the Eleusinian message of peace 
with a change of titles and of gods, but not of 
that spiritual hunger for peace and reconciliation with 
the powers whose vengeance is the haunting dread of 
almost every age, and of every race of men. 



CHAPTER VIII 

FROM ATHENS TO THEBES THE PASSES OF PARNES 

AND OF CITH^RON, ELEUTHER^, PLATiEA 

No ordinary student, looking at the map of Attica anc 
Boeotia, can realise the profound and complete separa- 
tion between these two countries. Except at the very 
northern extremity, where the fortified town of Oropus 
guarded an easy boundary, all the frontier consists not 
merely of steep mountains, but of parallel and inter- 
secting ridges and gorges, which contain indeed a few 
alpine valleys, such as that of CEnoe, but which are, 
as a rule, wild and barren, easily defensible by a few 
against many, and totally unfit for the site of any con- 
siderable town, or any advanced culture. As I before 
stated, the traveller can go by rail past Dekelea, or he 
can go most directly by Phyle, the fort which Thrasy- 
bulus seized, when he desired to reconquer Athens 
with his democratic exiles. The historians usually 
tell us c that he seized and fortified Phyle ' ; a state- 
ment which the present aspect of it seems to render 
very doubtful indeed. It is quite impossible that the 
great hill-fort of the very finest Attic building, which 
is still remaining, and admired by all, could have been 
'knocked up' by Thrasybulus and his exiles. The 
careful construction and the great extent of the 
building compel us to suppose it the work of a rich 
state, and of a deliberate plan of fortification. It 

179 



180 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

seems very unlikely, for these reasons, that it was built 
after the days of Thrasybulus, or that so important a 
point of attack should have been left unguarded in the 
greater days of Athens. I am therefore convinced 
that the fort, being built long before, and being, in 
fact, one of the well-known fortified demes through 
Attica, had been to some extent dismantled, or allowed 
to fall into decay, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, 
but that its solid structure required very little labour 
for the exiles to render it strong and easily defensible. 

This is one of the numerous instances in which a 
single glance at the locality sets right an historical 
statement that has eluded suspicion for ages. The 
fort of Phyle, like that of Eleutherae, of which I shall 
speak, and like those of Messene and of Orchomenus, 
is built of very perfect ashlar masonry, and laid together 
without a particle of rubble or cement, but so well 
fitted as to be able to resist the wear of ages better 
than almost any other building. I was informed by 
M. Emile Burnouf, that in the case of a fort at 
Megara, which I did not see, there are even polygonal 
blocks, of which the irregular and varying angles are 
fitted with such precision that it is difficult, as in the 
case of the Parthenon, to detect the joinings of the 
stones. The blocks are by no means so colossal in 
these buildings as in the great ruins about Mycenae - } 
but the fitting is closer, and the sites on which we 
find them very lofty, and with precipitous ascents. 
This style of building is specially mentioned by 
Thucydides (i. 93) as being employed in the building 
of the walls of the Peiraeus in the days of Themistocles, 
apparently in contrast to the rude and hurried con- 
struction of the city walls. But he speaks of the 
great stones being not only cut square, but fastened 
with clamps of iron soldered with lead. I am not 
aware that any traces of this are found in the 



«. 



vin FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 181 

remaining hill-forts. The walls of the Peiraeus have, 
unfortunately, long since almost totally disappeared. 

The way from Athens to Phyle leads north-west 
through the rich fields of the old deme of Acharnae ; 
and we wonder at first why they should be so noted 
as charcoal-burners. But as we approach Mount 
Parnes, we find that the valley is bounded by tracts of 
hillside fit for nothing but pine forest. A vast deal 
of wooding still remains ; it is clear that these forests 
were the largest and most convenient to supply Athens 
with firewood or charcoal. As usual there are many 
glens and river-courses through the rugged country 
through which we ascend — here and there a village, 
in one secluded nook a little monastery, hidden from 
the world, if not from its cares. There is the usual 
Greek vegetation beside the path ; not perhaps luxuriant 
to our Northern eyes, but full of colours of its own — 
the glowing anemone, the blood-red poppy, the delicate 
cistus on a rocky surface, with foliage rather grey and 
silvery than green. The pine-trees sound, as the breeze 
sweeps up the valleys, and lavish their strong fragrance 
through the air. 

There is something inexpressibly bracing in this 
solitude, if solitude it can be called, where the forest 
speaks to the eye and ear, and fills the imagination 
with the mystery of its myriad forms. Now and then, 
too, the peculiar cadence of those bells which hardly 
varies throughout all the lands of the South, tells you 
that a flock of goats, or goat-like sheep, is near, 
attended by solemn, silent children, whose eyes seem 
to have no expression beyond that of vague wonder in 
their gaze. 

At last we see high over us the giant fort of Phyle 
— set upon a natural precipice, which defends it amply 
for half its circuit. The point of occupation was well 
chosen, for while within sight of Athens, and near 



1 82 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

enough to afford a sure refuge to those who could 
escape by night and flv to the mountain, its distance 
(some fifteen miles) and the steep and rugged ascent 
made it impossible for weak and aged people to crowd 
into it and mar the efficiency of its garrison. With 
the increase of his force Thrasvbulus be^an successful 

J O 

raids into the plain, then a rapid movement to Peirasus ; 
ultimately, as may be read in any history, he accom- 
plished the liberation of his native city. 

We did not pass into Boeotia by way of Phyle, pre- 
ferring to take the longer route through Eleusis. But 
no sooner had we left Eleusis than we began to ascend 
into the rough country, which is the preface to the 
wild mountain passes of Cithasron. It is, indeed, verv 
difficult to find where one range of mountains begins 
and another ends, anywhere throughout Greece. There 
is generally one high peak, which marks a whole chain 
or system of mountains, and after this the svstem is 
called \ but all closer specification seems lost, on account 
of the immense number of ridges and points which 
crowd upon the view in several directions. Thus the 
chain of Parnes, after throwing out a spur towards 
the south-west, which divides the Athenian and the 
Thriasian plains, sweeps round the former in a sort 
of amphitheatre, and joins the system of Cithaeron 
(Kitheron), which extends almost parallel with Parnes. 
A simple look at a good map explains these things by 
supplementing mere description. But it should be 
specially remembered, that all the region where a plain 
is not expressly named is made up of broken mountain 
ridges and rocky defiles, so that it mav fairly be called an 
alpine country. A fellow-traveller, who had just been 
in Norway, was perpetually struck with its resemblance 
to the Norwegian highlands. 

I will onlv mention one other fact which illustrates 
the consequent isolation of the valleys. We have a 



viii FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 183 

river Kephissus in the plain of Athens. As soon as 
we cross the pass of Daphne we have another Kephissus 
in the Thriasian plain. Within a day's journey, or 
nearly so, we have another Kephissus, losing itself in 
the lake Copais, not far from Orchomenus. It reminds 
an Irishman of the numerous Blackwaters in Ireland. 
This repetition of the same name shows how little 
intercourse people have with neighbouring lands, how 
little they travel, and why there is no danger of con- 
fusion in these oft-repeated names. Such a fact, trifling 
as it is, illustrates very powerfully the isolation which 
the Greek mountains produce. 

I fear that most travellers will not be persuaded by 
me to avoid the train, and will insist on going to 
Thebes by that vulgar conveyance. It will take them, 
not over Cithaeron, but up into North Attica, to the 
high ground between Parnes and Pentelicus, and then 
past the lovely rich woods of Tatoi, the king's country 
seat, to the neighbourhood of the ancient Oropos. 
Tatoi is identified with the old Dekelea, from which 
King Agis, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, 
made his constant raids into the farms of Attica, 
and contributed largely to the ending of the long 
struggle. It was well known that he had established 
this fort, the true eyesore of Attica, at the advice of 
that traitorous person, Alcibiades, whose many vices 
could not destroy his intellectual force and his social 
charms. But he was only, fit to be a tyrant, not the 
citizen of a free state, and his genius was the bane of 
his country. When we approach the junction of the 
line which leads to Chalcis, we see the blue strait, and 
the great mountains of Euboea not far off", and we long 
for time to cross over and visit that still wild and 
lonely country. The idyll of Dion Chrysostom, 
which I have told in another book, 1 comes into our 

1 The Silver Age of Greece, 



1 84 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

thoughts, and we wonder whether there are still to be 
found in these wild glens hunters living with their 
families in purity and peace. The line to Thebes 
turns west and passes near Tanagra, of recent years 
so famous for the terra-cotta figurines found in its 
Necropolis. 

Those who desire a more characteristic journey will 
rather go by road — not by the diligence^ which refuses 
to stop when the traveller would gladly pause to study 
the life of a new country, but in a carriage, as we 
travelled it years ago. 

There is a good road from Athens to Thebes — a 
very unusual thing in Greece — and we were able to 
drive with four horses, after a fashion which would 
have seemed very splendid in old days. Strange to 
say, the old Greek fashion of driving four horses 
abreast, two being yoked to the pole, and two out- 
riggersj or Trapd<reipoi, as they were called, has dis- 
appeared from Greece, whereas it still survives in 
Southern Italy. On the other hand, the Greeks are 
more daring drivers than the Italians, being indeed 
braver in all respects, and, when a road is to be had, a 
very fast pace is generally maintained. 

As usual, the country was covered with brushwood, 
and with numbers of old gnarled fir-trees, which bore 
everywhere upon their stems the great wounds of the 
hatchet, made to extract the resin for the flavouring 
of wine. Rare flocks of goats, with their peculiar, 
dull, tinkling bells — bells which have the same make 
and tone all through Calabria, through Sicily, and 
through Greece — were the only sign of human occu- 
pation or of population. And when you look for 
houses, there is nothing in the shape of wall or roof, 
save an occasional station, where, but a few years 
since, soldiers were living, to keep the road safe from 
bandits. At last we came upon the camp of some 



viii FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 185 

Vlach shepherds — a thing reminding one far more of 
a gipsy camp than anything else — a few dark-brown 
skins falling over a horizontal, set upon two upright 
poles, so as to form a gable-shaped tent, of which the 
entrance looked so absolutely black as to form quite a 
patch in the landscape. There is mere room for lying 
in these tents by night ; and, I suppose, in the summer 
weather most of these wild shepherds will not con- 
descend even to this shelter. 1 

After some hours' drive, we reached a grassy dell, 
shaded by large plane - trees, where a lonely little 
public -house — if I may so call it — of this construc- 
tion invited us to stop for watering the horses, and 
inspecting more closely the owner. There was the 
usual supply found in such places — red and white 
wine in small casks, excellent fresh water, and 
lucumia y or Turkish delight. Not only had the 
owner his belt full of knives and pistols, but there was 
hanging up in a sort of rack a most picturesque 
collection of swords and guns — all made in Turkish 
fashion, with ornamented handles and stocks, and 
looking as if they might be more dangerous to the 
sportsman than to his game. While we were being 
served by this wild-looking man, in this suspicious 
place — in fact, it looked like the daily resort of bandits 
— his wife, a comely young woman, dressed in the 
usual dull blue, red, and white, disappeared through 
the back way, and hid herself among the trees. This 
fear of being seen by strangers — no doubt caused by 
jealousy among men, and, possibly, by an Oriental 
tone in the country — is a striking feature through 

1 The Greeks always regard these nomads as foreigners in race, and 
incapable of any settled or civilised life. They do great mischief to young 
trees and fences, which they never respect. Yet when arrested for doing 
mischief they are protected by the sympathies of the Greeks, who hate 
all coercion, however reasonable. 



1 86 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

most parts of Greece. It is said to be a remnant of 
the Turkish influence, but seems to me to lie deeper, 
and to be an echo of the old Greek days. The same 
feeling is prevalent in most parts of Sicily. In the 
towns there you seldom see ladies in the streets ; and 
in the evenings, except when the play-going public 
is returning from the theatre, there are only men 
visible. 

After leaving this resting-place, about eleven in 
the morning, we did not see a village, or even a 
single house, till we had crossed Cithaeron, after six 
in the evening, and descried the modern hamlet of 
Plataea on the slopes to our left. But once or twice 
through the day a string of four or five mules, with 
bright, richly striped rugs over their wooden saddles, 
and men dressed still more brightly sitting lady-fashion 
on them, were threading their way along the winding 
road. The tinkling of the mules' bells and the wild 
Turkish chaunts of the men were a welcome break 
in the uniform stillness of the journey. The way 
becomes gradually wilder and steeper, though often 
descending to cross a shady valley, which opens to the 
right and left, in a long narrow vista, and shows blue 
far-off hills of other mountain chains. One of these 
valleys was pointed out to us as CEnoe, an outlying 
deme of Attica, fortified in Periclean days, and which 
the Peloponnesian army attacked, as Thucydides tells 
us, and failed to take, on their invasion of Attica at 
the opening of the war. There are two or three 
strong square towers in this valley, close to the road, 
but not the least like any old Greek fort, and quite 
incapable of holding any garrison. The site is 
utterly unsuitable, and there seemed no remains of 
any walled town. 

These facts led me to reflect upon the narrative of 
Thucydides, who evidently speaks of CEnoe as the 



vin FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 187 

border fort of Attica, and yet says not a word about 
Eleutherae, which is really the border, the great fort, 
and the key to the passes of Cithaeron. The first 
solution which suggests itself is, that the modern 
Greeks have given the wrong names to these places, 
and that by CEnoe Thucydides really means the place 
now known as Eleutherae. 1 Most decidedly, if the 
fort which is now there existed at the opening of the 
Peloponnesian War, he cannot possibly have over- 
looked it in his military history of the campaign. 
And yet it seems certain that we must place the 
building of this fort at the epoch of Athens's greatness, 
when Attic influence was paramount in Bceotia, and 
when the Athenians could, at their leisure, and without 
hindrance, construct this fort, which commands the 
passes into Attica, before they diverge into various 
valleys, about the region of the so-called CEnoe. 

For, starting from Thebes, the slope of Cithaeron 
is a single unbroken ascent up to the ridge, through 
which, nearly over the village of Plataea, there is a cut 
that naturally indicates the pass. But when the 
traveller has ascended from Thebes to this point he 
finds a steep descent into a mountainous and broken 
region, where he must presently choose between 
a gorge to the right or to the left, and must wander 
about zigzag among mountains, so as to find his way 
towards Athens. And although I did not examine all 
the passes, it was perfectly obvious that, as soon as the 
first defile was left behind, an invader could find 
various ways of eluding the defenders of Attica, and 
penetrating into the Thriasian plain, or, by Phyle, into 
that of Athens. Accordingly, the Athenians chose 

1 Colonel Leake already felt these difficulties, and moves Eleutherae 
a few miles to the south-west. But CEnoe and Eleutherae must have 
been close together, from the allusion in the Antiope of Euripides. 
Cf. Eurip. frag. 179 (ed. Nauck), and the passages quoted there. 



1 88 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

a position of remarkable strength, just inside the last 
crowning ascent, where all the Attic ways converge to 
pass the crest of the mountain into Plataea. Here 
a huge rock, interposing between the mountains on 
each side, strives, as it were, to bar the path, which 
accordingly divides like a torrent bed, and passes on 
either side, close under the walls of the fort which 
occupies the top of the rock. From this point the 
summit of the pass is about two or three miles distant, 
and easily visible, so that an outpost there, commanding 
a view of the whole Theban plain, could signal any 
approach to the fort with ample notice. 

The position of the fort at Phyle, above described, 
is very similar. It lies within a mile of the top of the 
pass, on the Attic side, within sight of Athens, and 
yet near enough to receive the scouts from the top, 
and resist all sudden attack. No force could invade 
Attica without leaving a large force to besiege or 
mask it. 

Looking backward into Attica, the whole moun- 
tainous tract of CEnoe is visible ; and, though we 
cannot now tell the points actually selected, there is 
no difficulty in finding several which could easily pass 
the signal from Eleutherae to Daphne, and thence to 
Athens. We know that fire signals were commonly 
used among the Greeks from the days of iEschylus 
to those of Polybius, and we can here see an instance 
where news could be telegraphed some thirty miles 
over a very difficult country in a few moments. 
Meanwhile, as succours might be some time in 
arriving, the fort was of such size and strength as to 
hold a large garrison, and stop any army which could 
not afford to mask it, with a considerable force. 1 

The site was, of course, an old one, and the name 

1 This the Peloponnesians did at CEnoe, according to Thucydides j 
perhaps therefore at this very place. 



viii FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 189 

Eleutherae, if correctly applied to this fort, points to 
a time when some mountain tribe maintained its in- 
dependence here against the governments on either 
side in the plain, whence the place was called the 
c Free * place, or Liberties (as we have the term in 
Dublin). There is further evidence of this in a small 
irregular fort which still exists almost in the centre of 
the larger and later enclosure. This older fort is of 
polygonal masonry, very inferior to the other, and has 
almost fallen into ruins, while the later walls and 
towers are in many places perfect. The outer wall 
follows the nature of the position, the principle being 
to find everywhere an abrupt descent from the 
fortification, so that an assault must be very difficult. 
On the north side, where the rock is precipitous, the 
wall runs along in a right line ; whereas on the south 
side, over the modern road, it dips down the hill, and 
makes a semicircular sweep, so as to crown the 
steepest part of a gentler ascent. Thus the whole 
enclosure is of a half-moon shape. But, while the 
straight wall is almost intact, the curved side has in 
many places fallen to pieces. The building is the 
most perfect I have ever seen of the kind, made of 
square hewn stones, evidently quarried on the rock 
itself. The preserved wall is about 200 yards long, 
six and a half feet wide, and apparently not more than 
ten or twelve feet high ; but, at intervals of twenty- 
five or thirty yards, there are seven towers twice as 
deep as the wall, while the path along the battlement 
goes right through them. Each tower has a doorway 
on the outside of it, and close beside this there is also 
a doorway in the wall, somewhat larger. These door- 
ways, made by a huge lintel, about seven and a half 
feet long, laid over an aperture in the building, with 
its edges very smoothly and carefully cut, are for the 
most part absolutely perfect. As I could see no sign 



190 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

of doorposts or bolts, — a feature still noticeable in all 
temple gates, — it is evident that wooden doors and 
doorposts were fitted into these doorways — a dangerous 
form of defence, were not the entrances strongly pro- 
tected by the towers close beside them and over them. 
There were staircases, leading from the top of the 
wall outwards, beside some of the towers. The 
whole fort is of such a size as to hold not merely 
a garrison, but also the flocks and herds of the 
neighbouring shepherds, in case of a sudden and 
dangerous invasion ; and this, no doubt, was the 
primary intention of all the older forts in Greece and 
elsewhere. 1 

The day was, as usual, very hot and fine, and the 
hills were of that beautiful purple blue which Leighton 
so well reproduced in the backgrounds of his Greek 
pictures ; but a soft breeze brought occasional clouds 
across the sun, and varied the landscape with darker 
hues. Above us on each side were the noble crags of 
Cithaeron, with their grey rocks and their gnarled 
fir-trees. Far below, a bright mountain stream was 
rushing beside the pass into Attica ; around us were 
the great walls of the old Greeks, laid together with 
that symmetry, that beauty, and that strength which 
mark all their work. The massive towers are now 
defending a barren rock j the enclosure which had 
seen so many days of war and rapine was lying open 
and deserted ; the whole population was gone long 
centuries ago. There is still liberty there, and there 
is peace — but the liberty and the peace of solitude. 

A short drive from Eleutherae brought us to the 

1 There was no photograph of this very fine building existing when 
I was in Greece. The only drawing of it I have seen is in the plates of 
Dodwell's Archaological Tour in Greece — a splendid book. The fort 
of Phyle, though smaller, possesses all the features described in this fort, 
and shows that they represent a general type. 



vin FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 191 

.op of the pass, 1 and we suddenly came upon one 
of those views in Greece which leave us in doubt 
whether the instruction they give us, or the delight, 
is the greater. The whole plain of Thebes, and, 
beyond the intervening ridge, the plain of Orcho- 
menus, with its shining lake, were spread out before 
us. The sites of all the famous towns were easily recog- 
nisable. Plataea only was straight beneath us, on the 
slopes of the mountain, and as yet hidden by them. 
The plan of all Boeotia unfolded itself with great 
distinctness — two considerable plains, separated by 
a low ridge, and surrounded on all sides by chains of 
mountains. On the north there are the rocky hills 
which hem in Lake Copais from the Eubcean strait, 
and which nature had pierced before the days of 
history, aided by Minyan engineers, whose Karafiodpa^ 
as they were called, were tunnelled drains, which drew 
water from thousands of acres of the richest land. 
On the east, where we stood, was the gloomy 
Cithaeron — the home of awful mythical crimes, and 
of wild Bacchanalian orgies, the theme of many a 
splendid poem and many a striking tragedy. To the 
south lay the pointed peaks of Helicon — a mountain 
(or mountain chain) full of sweetness and light, with 
many silver streams coursing down its sides to water 
the Boeotian plains, and with its dells, the home of 
the Muses ever since they inspired the bard of Ascra 
— the home, too, of Eros, who, long after the reality 
of the faith had decayed, was honoured in Thespiae 
by the crowds of visitors who went up to see 

1 This pass (seized by the Persian cavalry before the battle of Platsea, 
in order to stop the Greek provision trains) was called rpeh Ke<fxxkal 
by the Thebans, but dpvbs Keep, by the Athenians (Herod, ix. 39) — 
evidently the same old name diversely interpreted by diverse Volki- 
etymologien. rpeis and 5pv6$ are pronounced almost alike in mode** 
Greek, probably therefore in old Greek likewise. But I wiU 
touch the thorny question of old Greek pronunciation. 



192 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

Praxiteles's famous statue of the god. This Helicon 
separates Boeotia from the southern sea, but does not 
close up completely with Cithaeron, leaving way for 
an army coming from the isthmus, where Leuctra 
stood to guard the entrance. Over against us, to the 
west, lay, piled against one another, the dark wild 
mountains of Phocis, with the giant Parnassus raising 
its snow-clad shoulders above the rest. But, in the 
far distance, the snowy Korax of iEtolia stood out in 
rivalry, and showed us that Parnassus is but the 
advance-guard of the wild country, which even in 
Greece proved too rugged a nurse for culture. 

We made our descent at full gallop down the 
windings of the road — a most risky drive ; but the 
coachman was daring and impatient, and we felt, in 
spite of the danger, that peculiar delight which accom- 
panies the excitement of going at headlong pace. We 
had previously an even more perilous experience in 
coming down the steep and tortuous descent from the 
Laurium mines to Ergasteria in the train, where the 
sharp turns were apparently full of serious risk. 
Above our heads were wheeling great vultures — huge 
birds, almost black, with lean, featherless heads — 
which added to the wildness of the scene. During 
this rapid journey, we came upon the site of Plataea, 
marked by a modern village of the name, on our left, 
and below us we saw the winding Asopus, and the 
great scene of the most momentous of all Greek 
battles — the battle of Plataea. This little town is 
situated much higher up the mountain than I had 
thought, and a glance showed us its invaluable posi- 
tion as an outpost of Athenian power towards Boeotia. 
With the top of the pass within an hour's walk, the 
Plataeans could, from their streets, see every move- 
ment over the Theban plain : they could see an 
invasion from the south coming up by Leuctra j 



mi FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 193 

they could see troops marching northward towards 
Tanagra and GEnophyta. They could even see into 
the Theban Cadmea, which lay far below them, and 
then telegraph from the top of the pass to Eleutherae, 
and from thence to Athens. We can, therefore, 
understand at once Plataea's importance to Athens, 
and why the Athenians built a strong fortified post on 
their very frontier, within easy reach of it. 

All the site of the great battle is well marked and 
well known — the fountain Gargaphia, the so-called 
island, and the Asopus, flowing lazily in a deep-cut 
sedgy channel, in most places far too deep to ford. 1 
Over our heads were still circling the great black 
vultures j but, as we neared the plain, we flushed a 
large black-and-white eagle, which we had not seen 
in Attica. There is some cultivation between Plataea 
and Thebes, but strangely alternating with wilder- 
ness. We were told that the people have plenty of 
spare land, and, not caring to labour for its artificial 
improvement, they till a piece of ground once, and 
then let it lie fallow for a season or two. The natural 
richness of the Boeotian soil thus supplies them with 
ample crops. But we wondered to think how impos- 
sible it seems even in these rich and favoured plains 
to induce a fuller population. 

The question of the depopulation of Greece is no 
new one — it is not due to the Slav inroads — it is not 
due to Turkish misrule. As soon as the political 
liberties of Greece vanished, so that the national talent 
found no scope in local government — as soon as the 
riches of Asia were opened to Greek enterprise — the 
population diminished with wonderful rapidity. All 
the later Greek historians and travellers are agreed about 

1 AH the topography of the battle has been freshly examined and ex- 
plained by Mr. Grundy, of Brasenose College, Oxford, the ablest and most 
thorough topographer of Greece since Colonel Leake. 

O 



194 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

the fact. 1 c The whole of Greece could not put in 
the field,' says one, c as many soldiers as came of old 
from a single city.' c Of all the famous cities of 
Bceotia,' says another, c but two — Thespiae and 
Tanagra — now remain.' The rest are mostly de- 
scribed as ruins (Ipei7rta). No doubt, every young 
enterprising fellow went off to Asia as a soldier or a 
merchant ; and this taste for emigrating has remained 
strong in the race till the present day, when most of 
the business of Constantinople, of Smyrna, and of Alex- 
andria is in the hands of Greeks. But, in addition to 
this, the race itself seems at a certain period to have 
become less prolific ; and this, too, is a remarkable 
feature lasting to our own time. In the several hospit- 
able houses in which I was entertained through the 
country I sought in vain for children. The young 
married ladies had their mothers to keep them com- 
pany, and' this was a common habit ; the daughter 
does not willingly separate from her mother. But, 
whether by curious coincidence or not, the absence 
of children in these seven or eight houses was very 
remarkable. I have been since assured that this was 
an accident, and that large families are very common 
in Greece. The statistics show a considerable increase 
of population of late years. 2 

The evening saw us entering into Thebes — the 
town of all others which retains the smallest vestiges 
of antiquity. Even the site of the Cadmea is not 
easily distinguishable. Two or three hillocks in and 
about the town are all equally insignificant, and all 
equally suitable, one should think, for a fortress. The 
discovery of the old foundations of the walls has, how- 

1 Cf. what I have said in relation to Polybius's account of it in my 
Greek Life and Thought, pp. 534 sq. 

2 Cf., for example, the figures in the recent (1891) Guide Joanne, ii. 
xxxvi. 



vni FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 195 

ever, determined the matter, and settled the site to be 
that of the highest part of the present town. Its 
strength, which was celebrated, must have been 
altogether due to artificial fortification, for though 
the old city was in a deeper valley to the north-west, 
yet from the other side there can never have been 
any ascent steep enough to be a natural rampart. 
The old city was, no doubt, always more renowned 
for eating and drinking than for art or architecture, 1 
and its momentary supremacy under Epaminondas 
was too busy and too short a season to be employed 
in such pursuits. But, besides all this, and besides 
all the ruin of Alexander's fury, the place has been 
visited several times with the most destructive earth- 
quakes, from the last of which (in 1852) it had not 
recovered when I first saw it. There were still through 
the streets houses torn open, and walls shaken down j 
there were gaps made by ruins, and half-restored 
shops. 

The antiquities of Thebes consist of a few in- 
scribed slabs and fragments which are (as usual) 
collected in a dark outhouse, where it is not easy to 
make them out. I was not at the trouble of reading 
these inscriptions, for in this department the anti- 
quaries of the University of Athens are really very 
zealous and competent, and I doubt whether any 
inscription now discovered fails to come into the 
Greek papers within a few months. From these they 
of course pass into the Corpus Inscriptionum Grcecarum^ 
a collection daily increasing, and periodically re-edited. 2 

1 There was, indeed, a splendid pleasaunce built at Thebes by the 
Frankish knights, which was completely destroyed by the grand Catalan 
company. It is described by their annalist Ramon Muntaner. The 
remains of one Frankish tower mark the place. 

* There are also modern selections. Dittenberger's and Michel's are 
the best. 



196 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

I may observe that, not only for manners and customs, 
but even for history, these undeniable and seldom 
suspicious sources are rapidly becoming our surest and 
even fullest authority. 

In the opinion of the inhabitants, by far the most 
important thing about the town is the tomb of their 
Evangelist, S. Luke, which is situated in a chapel close 
by. The stone is polished and worn with the feet and 
lips of pilgrims, and all such homes of long devotion 
are in themselves interesting ; but the visitor may 
well wonder that the Evangelist should have his 
tomb established in a place so absolutely decayed and 
depopulated as was the region of Thebes, even in his 
day. The tombs of the early preachers and mission- 
aries are more likely to be in the thickest of thorough- 
fares, amid the noise and strife of men. But here the 
Evangelist was confused with a later local saint of the 
same name. 1 

Thebes is remarkable for its excellent supply of 
water. Apart from the fountain Dirke, 2 several other 
great springs rise in the higher ground close to it, and 
are led by old Greek conduits of marble to the town. 
One of these springs was large enough to allow us to 
bathe — a most refreshing change after the long and 
hot carriage drive, especially in the ice-cold water, 
as it came from its deep hiding-place. We returned 
at eight in the evening to dine with our excellent host 
— a host provided for us by telegraph from Athens — 
where we had ample opportunity of noticing some 
of the peculiarities of modern Greek life. 

The general elections were at the moment pending. 
M. Boulgaris had just ichoui^ as the French say ; and 

1 See his life in Gregorovius's Athen, vol. i. pp. 144 :q. 

* The legend of the name is now fully explained in the fragment! 
of Euripides's Antiope published by me in the first volume of the Petri* 
papyri. 



vni FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 197 

the King, after a crisis in which a rupture of the 
Constitution had been expected, decided to try a 
constitutional experiment, and called to office M. 
Trikoupi, an advanced Radical in those days, and 
strongly opposed to the Government. But M. 
Trikoupi was a highly educated and reasonable man, 
well acquainted with England and English politics, 
and apparently anxious to govern by strictly con- 
stitutional means. He since proved himself, by his 
able and vigorous administration, one of the most 
remarkable statesmen in Europe, and the main cause 
of the progress of his country. His defeat in 1890 
was therefore a national misfortune. Our new friend 
at Thebes was then the Radical candidate, and was 
at the very time of our arrival canvassing his con- 
stituency. Every idle fellow in the town seemed to 
think it his duty to come up into his drawing-room, 
in which we were resting, and sit down to encourage 
and advise him. No hint that he was engaged in 
entertaining strangers had the smallest effect : noisy 
politics were inflicted upon us till the welcome 
announcement of dinner, to which, for a wonder, 
his constituents did not follow him. He told me 
that though all the country was strongly in favour 
of M. Trikoupi, yet he could hardly count upon a 
majority with certainty, for he had determined to 
let the elections follow their own course, and not 
control them with soldiers. In this most constitu- 
tional country, with its freedom, as usual, closely 
imitated from England, soldiers stood, at least up to 
the summer of 1875, round the booths, and hustled 
out any one who did not come to vote for the 
Ministerial candidate. M. Trikoupi refused to take 
this traditional precaution, and, as the result showed, 
lost his sure majority. 

But when I was there, and before the actual 



198 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

elections had taken place, the Radical party were 
very confident. Thev were not only to come in 
triumphant, but their first act was to be the arraigning 
of the late Prime Minister, M. Boulgaris, for violating 
the Constitution, and his condemnation to hard labour, 
with confiscation of his property. I used to plead 
the poor man's case earnestly with these hot-headed 
politicians, by way of amusement, and was highly 
edified by their arguments. The ladies, as usual, 
were by far the fiercest, and were ready, like their 
goddess of old, to eat the flesh of their enemies raw. 
I used to ask them whether it would not be quite 
out of taste if Mr. Disraeli, then in power, were to 
prosecute Mr. Gladstone for violating the Constitu- 
tion in his Irish Church Act, and have him con- 
demned to hard labour. The cases, they replied, 
were quite different. No Englishman could ever 
attain, or even understand, the rascality of the late 
Greek Minister. Feeling that there might be some 
force in this argument, I changed ground, and asked 
them were they not afraid that if he were persecuted 
in so violent a wav he might, instead of occupying the 
Opposition benches, betake himself to occupv the 
mountain passes, and, by robbing a few English 
travellers, so discredit the new Government as to 
be worse and more dangerous in opposition than in 
power. No, thev said, he will not do that ; he is 
too rich. But, said I, if you confiscate his property, 
he will be poor. True, they replied \ but still he will 
not be able to do it : he is too old. It seemed as if the 
idea that he might be too respectable never crossed their 
minds. 1 What was my surprise to hear within six 

1 I trust none will imagine that I intend the least disrespect to 
M. Boulgaris, who was, according to far better authority than that 
quoted in the text, an honourable and estimable man. But some of 
his Ministers were since convicted of malpractices concerning certain 



vni FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 199 

months that this dreadful culprit had come into power 
again at the head of a considerable majority ! 

We were afterwards informed by a sarcastic 
observer that many of the Greek politicians are 
paupers, ' who will not dig, and to beg they are 
ashamed ' j and so they sit about the cafls of Athens 
on the look-out for one of the 10,000 places which 
have been devised for the patronage of the Ministry. 
But, as there are some 30,000 expectants, it follows 
that the 20,000 disappointed are always at work 
seeking to turn out the 10,000. Hence a crisis every 
three months ; hence a Greek ambassador could hardly 
reach his destination before he was recalled ; hence, 
too, the exodus of all thrifty and hard-working men 
to Smyrna, to Alexandria, or to Manchester, where 
their energies were not wasted in perpetual political 
squabbling. The greatest misconduct with which a 
man in office could be charged was the holding of 
it for any length of time ; the whole public then join 
against him, and cry out that it is high time for him, 
after so long an innings, to make way for some one 
else. It was not till M. Trikoupi established his 
ascendency that this ridiculous condition of things 
ceased. Whether in office or in opposition, he had a 
policy, and retained the confidence of foreign powers. 

I had added, in the first edition of this book, some 
further observations on the apparent absurdity of 
introducing the British Constitution, or some parody 
of it, into every new state which is rescued from 
barbarism or from despotism. I am not the least 
disposed to retract what I then said generally, but 
it is common justice to the Greeks to say that later 
events made us hope that they were among the few 
nations where such an experiment might succeed. 

archbishoprics, which were bought for money. The trial is now a 
matter of history, to which an allusion is sufficient. 



200 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

When the dangerous crisis of the Turco-Russian war 
supervened, instead of rushing to arms, as they were 
advised by some fanatical English politicians, they set 
about to reform their Ministry ; and, feeling the 
danger of perpetually changing the men at the helm, 
they insisted on the heads of the four principal parties 
forming a coalition, under the nominal leadership 
of M. Canaris. 1 This great political move, one of 
the most remarkable of our day, was attempted, as 
far as I can make out, owing to the deliberate pressure 
of the country, and from a solid interest in its welfare. 
Even though temporary, it was an earnest that the 
Greeks were learning national politics, and that a 
liberal constitution was not wasted upon them. 
There are many far more developed and important 
nations in Europe, which would not be capable of 
such a sacrifice of party interests and party ambition. 

We left Thebes, very glad that we had seen it, 
but not very curious to see it again. Its site makes 
it obviously the natural capital of the rich plain 
around it ; and we can also see at once how the 
larger and richer plain of Orchomenus is separated 
from it by a distinct saddle of rising ground, and was 
naturally, in old times, the seat of a separate power. 
But the separation between the two districts, which 
is not even so steep or well marked as the easy pass 
of Daphne between Athens and Eleusis, makes it also 
clear that the owners of either plain would certainly 

1 Since that time, the chief power was for years in the hands of 
M. Trikoupi, an honest patriot. Yet it was the misfortune of the 
country to be reduced by M. Delyanni to the verge of bankruptcy 
through his absurd war policy against Turkey. It is probable enough 
that he did not lead, but was carried along by this policy, with which all 
the Athenian ' Jingoes ' were possessed. Even since that time, the 
Greek policy regarding Crete and Macedonia does not seem to indicate 
any growth of political wisdom. At the moment I am writing (1907) 
the rabid jealousy of Greeks and Bulgarians, who both claim to succeed to 
Macedonia -when the Turks are driven cut, keeps the Turks in possession. 



vni FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 201 

cast the eye of desire upon the possessions of their 
neighbours, and so at an early epoch Orchomenus 
was subdued. For many reasons this may have been 
a disaster to Greece. The Minyae of Orchomenus, 
as people called the old nobles who settled there in 
prehistoric days, were a great and rich society, build- 
ing forts and treasure-houses, and celebrated, even 
in Homer's day, for wealth and splendour. 

But, perhaps owing to this very luxury, they were 
subdued by the inartistic, vulgar Thebans, who, 
during centuries of power and importance, never rose 
to greatness save through the transcendent genius of 
Pindar and of Epaminondas. When people came 
from a distance to see art in Bceotia, they came to 
little Thespiae, in the southern hills, where the Eros 
of Praxiteles was the pride of the citizens. Tanagra, 
too, by the terra-cottas of which I have spoken (above, 
p. 55), shows taste and refinement ; and we still look 
with sympathy upon the strangely modern fashions of 
these graceful and elegant figures. At Thebes, so far 
as I know, no trace of fine arts has yet been discovered. 
The great substructure of the Cadmea, the solid 
marble water-pipes of their conduits, a few inscriptions 
— that is all. It corroborates what we find in the 
middle and new comedy of the Greeks, that Thebes 
was a place for eating and drinking, a place for other 
coarse material comforts — but no place for real culture 
or for art. Even their great poet, Pindar, a poet in 
whom most critics find all the highest qualities of 
genius — loftiness, daring, originality — even this great 
man — no doubt from the accidents of his age — worked 
by the job, and bargained for the payment of his 
noblest odes. 

Thus, even in Pindar, there is something to remind 
us of his Theban vulgarity ; and it is, therefore, all 
the more wonderful, and all the more freely to be 



202 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

confessed, that in Epaminondas we find not a single 
flaw or failing, and that he stands out as the noblest 
of all the great men whom Greece ever produced. It 
were possible to maintain that he was also the greatest, 
but this is a matter of opinion and of argument. 
Certain it is that his influence made Thebes, for the 
moment, not only the leader in Greek politics, but 
the leader in Greek society. Those of his friends 
whom we know seem not only patriots, but gentle- 
men — they cultivated with him music and eloquence, 
nor did they despise philosophy. So true is it, that in 
this wonderful peninsula genius seemed possible every- 
where, and that from the least cultivated and most 
vulgar town might arise a man to make all the world 
about him admire and tremble. 

I will make but one more remark about this plain 
of Bceotia. There is no part of Greece so sadly 
famed for all the battles with which its soil was 
stained. The ancients called it Mars' Orchestra^ or 
exercising ground ; and even now, when all the old 
life is gone, and when not a hovel remains to mark 
the site of once well-built towns, we may indeed ask 
why were these towns celebrated ? Simply because 
in old Greek history their names served to specify 
a scene of slaughter, where a campaign, or it may 
be an empire, was lost or won. Plataea, Leuctra, 
Haliartus, Coronea, Chaeronea, Delium, GEnophyta, 
Tanagra — these are in history the landmarks of 
battles, and landmarks of nothing more. Thebes is 
mainly the nurse of the warriors who fought in these 
battles, and but little else. So, then, we cannot com- 
pare Bceotia to the rich plains of Lombardy — they, 
too, in their day, ay, and in our own day, Mars' 
Orchestra — for here literature and art have given 
fame to cities, while the battles fought around their 
walls have been forgotten by the world. 



vm FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 203 

I confess we saw nothing of the foggy atmosphere 
so often brought up against the climate of Bceotia. 
And yet it was then, of course, more foggy than it 
had been of old, for then the lake Copais was partially 
drained, whereas in 1875 the old tunnels, cut, or rather 
enlarged, by the Minyas, were choked, and thousands 
of acres of the richest land covered with marsh and 
lake. It was M. Trikoupi who promoted the plan of 
a French Company to drain the lake more completely 
than even the old Catabothra had done, and, at the 
cost of less than one million sterling, to bring into 
permanent cultivation some thousands of acres — in 
fact, the largest and richest plain in all Greece. I 
asked him where he meant to find a population to till 
it, seeing that the present land was about ten times 
more than sufficient for the inhabitants. He told me 
that some Greek colonists, who had settled in the 
north, under the Turks or Servians (I forget which), 
were desirous of returning to enjoy the sweets of 
Hellenic liberty. It was proposed to give them the 
reclaimed tract. I objected that if these good people 
reasoned from analogy, they would be slow to trust 
their fortunes to their old fellow-countrymen. So 
long as they were indigent they would be unmolested, 
— cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator^ — but as soon as 
they prospered, or were supposed to prosper, we might 
have the affair of Laurium repeated. The natives 
might be up in arms against the strangers who had 
come to plunder the land of the wealth intended 
by nature for others. The Greek Parliament might 
be persuaded to make retrospective laws and restric- 
tions, and probably all the more active and impatient 
spirits would leave a country where prosperity implied 
persecution, and where people only awake to the value 
of their possessions after they have sold them to others. 

What happened since illustrates the views which 



204 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

I then urged. When the drainage works, completed 
in 1887, had uncovered rich tracts, the Government 
laid claim to every acre of it, and endeavoured to 
fence off the old riparian proprietors. They on their 
side disputed the new boundaries, and claimed what 
the Government professed to have uncovered. But 
ultimately the Government were able to let the tract 
— some 60,000 acres — to a company worked by Eng- 
lishmen, and in London. 1 

I think jealousy no accidental feature, but one 
specially engrained in the texture of Greek human 
nature from the earliest times. Nothing can be a 
more striking or cogent proof of this than the way in 
which Herodotus sets down jealousy as one of the 
attributes of the Deity. For the Deities of all nations 
being conceptions formed after the analogy of human 
nature around them, there can be no doubt that the 
honest historian put it down as a necessary factor in 
the course and constitution of nature. We can only 
understand Greek history by keeping these things 
perpetually in mind, and even now it explains the 
apparent anomaly, how a nation so essentially demo- 
cratic — who recognise no nobility and no distinctions 
of rank — can be satisfied with a king of foreign race. 
They told me themselves, over and over again, that 
the simple reason was this : no Greek could tolerate 
another set over him, so that even such an office as 
President of a Greek Republic would be intolerable, if 
held by one of themselves. And this same feeling in 
old times is the real reason of the deadly hate mani- 
fested against the most moderate and humane despots. 

1 The report of the Company for 1907 does not seem very encourag- 
ing. They had ceded 7000 acres to the Government and to satisfy 
private claims. Of the rest not more than one-half was under cultiva- 
tion. There were disastrous wet seasons lately, which submerged crops, 
and there was difficulty in getting people to take up and work farms on 
the estate. Large additional drainage was, however, in prospect. 



vin FROM ATHENS TO THEBES 205 

However able, however kindly, however great such a 
despot might be ; however the state might prosper 
under him, one thing in him was intolerable — he had 
no natural right to be superior to his fellows. I will 
not deny the existence of political enthusiasm, and of 
real patriotism among Greek tyrannicides, but I am 
quite sure that the universal sympathy of the nation 
with them was based upon this deep-seated feeling. 

It is said that, in another curious respect, the old 
and modern Greeks are very similar — I mean the form 
which bribery takes in their political struggles. It has 
been already observed and discussed by Freeman, how, 
among the old Greeks, it was the politician who was 
bribed, and not the constituents ; whereas among us 
in England, the leading politicians are above suspicion, 
while the constituents are often corruptible enough. 
Our Theban friend told me that in modern Greece 
the ancient form of bribery was still in fashion ; and 
that, except in Hydra and one other place — probably, 
if I remember rightly, Athens — the bribing of con- 
stituents was unknown ; while the taking of bribes 
by Ministers was alleged not to be very uncommon. 
A few years ago, men of sufficient importance to be 
Cabinet Ministers were openly brought into court, 
and indicted for the sale of three archbishoprics, those 
of Patras and Corinth among the number. There is 
no doubt that this public charge points to a sort of 
bribery likely to take place in any real democracy, 
when the men at the head of affairs are not men of 
great wealth and noble birth, but often ordinary, or 
even needy persons, selected by ballot, or popular vote, 
to fill for a very short time a very influential office. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE PLAIN OF ORCHOMENUS, LIVADIA, CH^RONEA 

The road from Thebes to Lebadea (Livddia) leads 
along the foot of Helicon all the way — Helicon, 
which, like almost all celebrated Greek mountains, is 
not a summit, but a system of summits, or even a 
chain. Looking in the morning from the plain, the 
contrast of the dark Cithaeron and the gentle sunny 
Helicon strikes the traveller again and again. After 
the ridge, or saddle, is passed which separates the plain 
of Thebes from that of Orchomenus, the richness of 
the soil increases, but the land becomes very swampy 
and low, for at every half-mile comes a clear silver 
river, tumbling from the slopes of Helicon on our left, 
crossing the road, and flowing to swell the waters of 
Lake Copais x — once a vast sheet with undefined edges, 
half-marsh, half-lake — which for centuries had no out- 
let to the sea, and which was only kept from covering 
all the plain by evaporation in the heats of summer. 
Great fields of sedge and rushes, giant reeds, and 

1 I leave this description untouched, though the lake has since been 
drained, and I saw, in 1905, the blue surface of the lake replaced by the 
colours of a vast plain covered with the brilliant green of growing crops. 
Several great watercourses lead to the old catabothra (or fissures in the 
limestone rock) which the prehistoric Minyae of Orchomenus had 
attempted to improve by tunnelling the northern hills into the Strait 
of Euboea. These had been reopened and enlarged by modern engineers 
working for the Lake Copais Company. 

206 



chap, ix PLAIN OF ORCHOMENUS 207 

marsh plants unknown to colder countries, mark each 
river course as it nears the lake ; and, as might be 
expected in this lonely fen country, all manner of 
insect life and all manner of amphibia haunt the sites 
of ancient culture. Innumerable dragon-flies, of the 
most brilliant colours, were flitting about the reeds, 
and lighting on the rich blades of grass # which lay on 
the water's surface ; and now and then a daring frog 
would charge boldly at so great a prize, but retire 
again in fear when the fierce insect dashed against 
him in its impetuous start. Large land tortoises, with 
their high - arched shells, yellow and brown, and 
patterned like the section of a great honeycomb, went 
lazily along the moist banks, and close by the water, 
which they could not bear to touch. Their aquatic 
cousins, on the other hand, were not solitary in habit, 
but lay in lines along the sun-baked mud, and at the 
first approach of danger dropped into the water one 
after the other with successive flops, looking for all 
the world a long row of smooth black pebbles which 
had suddenly come to life, like old Deucalion's clods, 
that they might people this solitude. The sleepy and 
unmeaning faces of these tortoises were a great con- 
trast to those of the water-snakes, which were very 
like them in form, but wonderfully keen and lively in 
expression. They, too, would glide into the water, 
when so strange a thing as man came near, but would 
presently raise their heads above the surface, and eye 
with wonder and suspicion, and in perfect stillness, 
the approach of their natural enemy. The Copaic 
eels, so celebrated in the Attic comedy as the greatest 
of all dainties, are a thing of the past. We noticed 
that while the shrill cicada, which frequents dry places, 
was not common here, great emerald-green grass- 
hoppers were flying about spasmodically, in sound and 
weight like a small bird. 



208 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

As we passed along, we were shown the sites of 
Haliartus and Coronea — Haliartus, where the cruel 
Lysander met his death in a skirmish, and so gave a 
place in history to an obscure village — Coronea, where 
the Spartans first learned to taste the temper of the 
Theban infantry, and jwhere King Agesilaus well- 
nigh preceded his great rival to the funeral pyre. As 
I said before, all these towns are only known by 
battles. Thespiae has an independent interest, and so 
has Ascra. The latter was the residence of the earliest 
known Greek poet of whose personality we can be 
sure , Thespiae, with its highly aristocratic society, 
which would not let a shopkeeper walk their place of 
assembly for ten years after he had retired from busi- 
ness, was the site of fair temples and statues, and held 
its place and fame long after all the rest of the sur- 
rounding cities had sunk into decay. There are 
indistinct remains of surrounding walls about both 
Haliartus and Coronea, but surely nothing that would 
repay the labour of excavations. All these Boeotian 
towns were, of course, fortified, and all of them lay 
close to the hills ; for the swampy plain was unhealthy, 
and in older days the rising lake was said to have 
swallowed up towns which had been built close upon 
its margin. But the supremacy of Orchomenus in 
older, and Thebes in later days, never allowed these 
subject towns to attain any importance or any political 
significance. 

After some hours' riding, we suddenly came upon 
a deep vista in the mountains on our left — such another 
vista as there is behind Coronea, but narrower, and 
inclosed on both sides with great and steep mountains. 
And here we found the cause of the cultivation of the 
upper plain — here was the town of Lebadea (Livddia), 
famed of old for the august oracle of Trophonius — 
in later days the Turkish capital of the surrounding 



IX 



LIVADIA 209 



province. To this the roads of all the neighbourhood 
converge, and from this a small force can easily com- 
mand the deep gorges and high mountain passes which 
lead through Delphi to the port of Kirrha. Even 
now there is more life in Livadia than in most Greek 
towns. All the wool of the country is brought in 
and sold there, and, with the aid of their great water 
power, they have a considerable factory, where the 
wool is spun and woven into stuff. A large and 
beautifully clear river comes down the gorge above 
the town — or rather the gorge in which the town lies 
— and tumbles in great falls between the streets and 
under the houses, which have wooden balconies, like 
Swiss chalets, built over the stream. The whole 
aspect of the town was not unlike a Swiss town ; 
indeed, all the features of the upland country are ever 
reminding the traveller of his Swiss experience. 

But the people are widely different. It was a 
great saint's day, and all the streets were crowded 
with peasants from many miles round. As we noted 
in all Greek towns, except Arachova, the women were 
not to be seen in any numbers. They do not walk 
about the streets except for some special ceremony or 
amusement. But no women's costume is required to 
lend brightness to the colouring of the scene ; for here 
every man had his fustanella or kilt of dazzling white, 
his grey or puce embroidered waistcoat, his great white 
sleeves, and his scarlet skull-cap, with its blue tassel. 1 
Nothing can be imagined brighter than a dense crowd 
in this dress. They were all much excited at the 
arrival of strangers, and crowded around us without 
the least idea or care about being thought obtrusive. 
The simple Greek peasant thinks it his right to make 

1 I found, in 1905, that in most of the country towns the fine Albanian 
costume was fast disappearing, and making way for the meanest European 
dress, dull in colour and hideous in make. 



210 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

aloud what observations he chooses upon any stranger, 
and has not the smallest idea of the politeness of 
reticence on such occasions. 

We were received most hospitably by the medical 
officer of the district, who had an amiable young wife,, 
speaking Greek only, and a lively old mother-in-law, 
living, as usual, permanently in the house, to prevent 
the young lady from being lonely. Like all the richer 
Greeks in country parts, they ate nothing till twelve, 
when they had a sort of early dinner called breakfast, 
and then dined again at half-past eight in the evening. 
This arrangement gave us more than enough time to 
look about the town when our day's ride was over ; so we 
went, first of all, to see the site of Trophonius's oracle. 

As the gorge becomes narrower, there is, on the 
right side, a small cave, from which a sacred stream 
flows to join the larger river. Here numerous square 
panels, cut into the rock to hold votive tablets, (now 
gone), indicate a sacred place, to which pilgrims came 
to offer prayers for aid, and thanksgiving for success. 
The actual seat of the oracle is not certain, and is 
supposed to be some cave or aperture now covered by 
the Turkish fort on the rock immediately above ; but 
the whole glen, with its beetling sides, its rushing 
river, and its cavernous vaulting, seems the very home 
and preserve of superstition. We followed the wind- 
ings of the defile, jumping from rock to rock up the 
river bed, and were soon able to bathe beyond the 
observation of all the crowding boys, who, like the 
boys of any other town, could not satisfy their curiosity 
at strangeness of face and costume. As we went on 
for some miles, the country began to open, and to 
show us a bleak and solitary mountain region, where 
the chains of Helicon and Parnassus join, and shut 
out the sea of Corinth from Bceotia by a great bar 
some twenty miles wide. Not a sound could be 



IX 



LIVADIA 211 



heard in this wild loneliness, save the metallic pipe of 
an ouzel by the river, and the scream of hawks about 
their nests, far up on the face of the cliffs. 

As the evening was closing in we began to retrace 
our steps, when we saw in two or three places scarlet 
caps over the rocks, and swarthy faces peering down 
upon us with signs and shouts. Though nothing 
could have been more suspicious in such a country, I 
cannot say that we felt the least uneasiness, and we 
continued our way without regarding them. They 
kept watching us from the heights, and when at last 
we descended nearer to the town, they came and 
made signs, and spoke very new Greek, to the effect 
that they had been out scouring the country for us, 
and that they had been very uneasy about our safety. 
This was, indeed, the case ; our excellent Greek com- 
panion, who felt responsible to the Greek Govern- 
ment for our safety, and who had stayed behind in 
Liv&dia to make arrangements, had become so uneasy 
that he had sent out the police to scour the country. 
So we were brought in with triumph by a large 
escort of idlers and officials, and presently sat down to 
dinner at the fashionable hour, though in anything 
but fashionable dress. The entertainment would have 
been as excellent as even the intentions of our host, 
had not our attention been foolishly distracted by bugs 
walking up the table-cloth. It is, indeed, but a small 
and ignoble insect, yet it produces a wonderful effect 
upon the mind ; for it inspires the most ordinary 
man with the gift of prophecy : it carries him away 
even from the pleasures of a fair repast into the hours 
of night and mystery, when all his wisdom and all 
his might will not save him from the persistent 
skirmishing of his irreconcilable foe. 

It may be here worth giving a word of encourage- 
ment to the sensitive student, whom these hints are 



212 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

apt to deter from venturing into the wilds of Greece. 
in spite of frequent starvation, both for want of food 
and for want of eatable food ; in spite of frequent 
sleeplessness and even severe exercise at night, owing 
to the excess of insect population ; x such is the 
lightness and clearness of the air, such the exhilarating 
effect of great natural beauty, and of solitary wander- 
ing, free and unshackled, across the wild tracts of 
vallev, wood, and mountain, that fatigue is an almost 
impossible feeling. Eight or ten hours* riding every 
dav, which in other countrv and other air would have 
been almost unendurable, was here but the natural 
exercise which any ordinary man may convenientlv 
take. It cannot be denied that the discomforts of 
Greek travelling are verv great, but with good temper 
and patience they can all be borne -, and when they 
are over, thev form a pleasant feature in the recollec- 
tions of a glorious time. Besides, these discomforts 
are only the really classical mode of travelling. 
Dionysus, in Aristophanes's Frogs^ asks, especiallv 
about the inns, the very questions which we often 
put to our guide j and if his slave carried for him not 
only ordinary baggage, but also his bed and bedding, 
so nowadays there are many khans (inns) where the 
traveller cannot lie down — I was going to say to rest — 
except on his own rugs. 8 

1 This plague seems unavoidable in a southern climate, wherever 
the houses, however good, are built of wood, and does not imply any 
ungrateful reflection upon my refined and generous hosts. In the Morea, 
where houses are built of masonry, even badly kept houses are compara- 
tively safe. 

2 In former days I travelled with a Greek friend, and with a hired 
servant who knew the country, and trusted to what accommodation 
and hospitality we could get. That cost us about 7 or 8 francs a 
dav, each. Xow the fashion is to be luxurious, if the term be not 
absurd, and entrust everything to a dragoman, who charges 45 francs 
a day per person, but who carries with him a cook and the necessary 
beaaing. 



ix ORCHOMENUS 213 

The next day was occupied in a tour across the 
plain to Orchomenus, then to Chaeronea, and back to 
Livddia in the evening, so as to start from thence for 
the passes to Delphi. Our ride was, as it were, 
round an isosceles triangle, beginning with the right 
base angle, going to Orchomenus north-east as the 
vertex, then to Chaeronea at the left base angle, and 
home again over the high spurs of mountain which 
protrude into the plain between the two base angles 
of our triangle. For about a mile, as we rode out of 
Livddia, a wretched road of little rough paving-stones 
tormented us — the remains of Turkish engineering, 
when Livadia was their capital. Patches of this work 
are still to be found in curious isolation over the 
mountains, to the great distress of both mules and 
riders ; for the stones are very small and pointed, or, 
where they have been worn smooth, exceedingly 
slippery. But we soon got away into deep rich 
meadows upon the low level of the country adjoining 
the lake, where we found again the same infinitely 
various insect life which I have already described. A 
bright merry Greek boy, in full dress (for it was 
again a holiday), followed in attendance on each mule 
or pony, and nothing could be more picturesque than 
the cavalcade, going in Indian file through the long 
grass, among the gay wild flowers, especially when 
some creek or rivulet made our course to wind about, 
and so brought the long line of figures into more 
varied grouping. As for the weather, it was so 
uniformly splendid that we almost forgot to notice it. 
Indeed, strangers justly remark what large conversation 
it affords us in Ireland, for there it is a matter of 
constant uncertainty, and requires forethought and 
conjecture. During my first journey in Greece, in 
the months of April, May, and June, there was 
nothing to be said, except that we saw one heavy 



214 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

shower at Athens, and two hours' rain in Arcadia, and 
that the temperature was not excessively hot. I have 
had similar experiences in March and April during 
three other sojourns in the country. 

In two or three hours we arrived at the site of 
old Orchomenus, of late called Scripou, but now 
reverting, like all Greek towns, to its original name. 
There is a mere hamlet, some dozen houses, at the 
place, which is close to the stone bridge built over 
the Kephissus — the Boeotian Kephissus — at this 
place. This river appears to be the main feeder of 
the Copaic lake, coming down, as we saw it, muddy 
and cold with snow-water from the heights of 
Parnassus. It runs very rapidly, like the Iser at 
Munich, and is at Orchomenus about double the size 
of that river. Of the so-called treasure-house of the 
Minyae, nothing remains but the stone doorposts and 
the huge block lying across them ; and even these are 
almost embedded in earth. It was the most disappoint- 
ing ruin I had seen in Greece, for it was always 
quoted with the treasure-house of Atreus at Mycenae 
as one of the great specimens of prehistoric building. 
It is not so interesting in any sense as the correspond- 
ing raths in Ireland. Indeed, but for Pausanias's 
description, it would, I think, have excited but little 
attention. 

The subsequent excavation of it by Dr. Schliemann 
yielded but poor results. The building had fallen in 
but a few years before. A handsome ceiling pattern 
was all that rewarded the explorer, to which a curious 
parallel was afterwards found at Tiryns ; and I also 
found it on the roof of a rock tomb in Nubia, and on 
the robe of a goddess over against Wadi Haifa, on the 
wall of the temple of Thothmes III. 

On the hill above are the well-preserved remains 
of the small Acropolis, of which the stones are so 



ix ORCHOMENUS 415 

carefully cut that it looks at first sight modern, then 
too good for modern work, but in no case polygonal, 
as are the walls of the hill city which it protected. 
There is a remarkable tower built on the highest 
point of the hill, with a very perfect staircase up to 
it. The whole of the work is very like the work of 
Eleutherae, and seems to be of the best period of 
Greek wall-building. Nothing surprises the traveller 
in Greece more than the number of these splendid 
hill-forts, or town-fortresses, which are never noticed 
by the historians as anything remarkable — in fact, the 
art and the habit of fortifying must have been so 
universal that it excited no comment. This strikes 
us all the more when so reticent a writer as Thucy- 
dides, who seldom gives us anything but war or 
politics, goes out of his way to describe the wall- 
building of the Peiraeus. He evidently contrasts it 
with the hurried and irregular construction of the 
city walls, into which even tombstones were built ; 
but if we did not study the remains still common in 
Greece, we might imagine that the use of square 
hewn stones, the absence of mortar and rubble, and 
the clamping with lead and iron were exceptional, 
whereas that sort of building is the most usual in 
Greece. The walls of the Peiraeus cannot even have 
been the earliest specimen, for the great portal at 
Mycenae, though somewhat rougher and more huge 
in execution, is on the same principle. The only 
peculiarity of these walls may have been their height 
and width, and upon that point it is not easy to get 
any monumental evidence now. The walls of the 
Peiraeus have disappeared completely, though the 
foundations are still traceable ; others have stood, but 
perhaps on account of their lesser height. 

In a large and hospitable monastery we found the 
well which Pausanias describes as close beside the 



216 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

shrine of the Graces, and here we partook of breakfast, 
attended by our muleteers, who always accompany 
their employer into the reception-room of his host, 
and look on at meat, ready to attend, and always 
joining if possible in the conversation at table. Some 
excellent specimens of old Greek pottery were shown 
us in the monastery, apparently, though not ostensibly, 
for sale, there being a law prohibiting the sale of 
antiquities to foreigners, or for exportation. In their 
chapel the monks pointed out to us some fragments 
of marble pillars, and one or two inscriptions — in 
which I was since informed that I might have found 
a real live digamma, if I had carefully examined 
them. The digamma is now common enough at 
Olympia and elsewhere. I saw it best, along with the 
koph y which is, I suppose, much rarer, in the splendid 
bronze plates containing Locrian inscriptions, which 
were in the possession of Mr. Taylor's heirs at Corfu. 1 
These plates have been ably commented on, with 
facsimile drawings of the inscriptions, by a Greek 
writer, G. N. Ecnomfdes (Corfu, 1850, and Athens, 
1869). 

It was on our way up the valley to Chaeronea, 
along the rapid stream of the Kephissus, that we 
came, in a little deserted church, upon one of the 
most remarkable extant specimens of a peculiar epoch 
in Greek art. As usual, it was set up in the dark, 
and we were repeatedly obliged to entreat the natives 
to clear the door, through which alone we could 
obtain any light to see the work. It is a funeral 
stele^ not unlike the celebrated stele and its relief at 
Athens, which is inscribed as the stele of Aristion, 
and dates from the time of the Persian wars. The 
work before us was inscribed as the work of Alxenor 
the Naxian — an artist otherwise unknown to us \ but 

1 They are now in the British Museum. 



ix PLAIN OF ORCHOMENUS 217 

the style and finish are very remarkable, and more 
perfect than the stele of Aristion. It is a relief 
carved on an upright slab of grey Boeotian marble — I 
should say about four feet in height — and representing 
a bearded man wrapped in a cloak, resting on a long 
stick propped under his arm, 1 with his legs awkwardly 
crossed, and offering a large grasshopper to a dog 
sitting before him. The hair and beard are con- 
ventionally curled, the whole effect being very like 
an Assyrian relief; but this is the case with all the 
older Greek sculpture, which may have started in 
Ionia by an impulse from the far east. The occurrence 
of the dog, a feature which strikes us frequently in 
the later Attic tombs, supports what I had long 
since inferred from stray hints in Greek literature, 
that dogs among the old Greeks, as well as the 
modern, were held in the highest esteem as the friends 
and companions of man. This curious monument of 
early Greek art was lying hidden in an obscure and 
out-of-the-way corner of Greece ; isolated, too, and 
with little of antiquarian interest in its immediate 
neighbourhood. 2 On my second visit (1884), I found 
a cast of it in the Ministry of Public Instruction at 
Athens. On my third I found the original removed 
to a prominent place in the National Museum at 
Athens, where the traveller may now study it at his 
ease. 

The great value of these reliefs consists (apart from 
their artistic value) in their undoubted genuineness. 
For we know that in later days, both in Greece and 
Italy, a sort of pre-Raphaelite taste sprang up among 

1 Cf. Polygnotus's picture of Agamemnon (Paus. x. 30. 3), arKrjTTTptp 
re virb tt]v apiarcpcLv /xacrxdA^j/ epei86/j.evos. 

3 Since these words were written, M. Holleaux's researches at 
Akraephiae have not only discovered the inscription containing the 
Emperor Nero's speech to the Greeks, but also many curious remains 
from the temple of Apollo Ptooa. 



218 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

amateurs, who admired and preferred the stiff awkward 
groping after nature to the symmetry and grace of 
perfect art. Pausanias, for example, speaks with 
enthusiasm of these antique statues and carvings, and 
generally mentions them first, as of most importance. 
Thus, after describing various archaic works on the 
Acropolis of Athens, he adds, c But whoever places 
works made with artistic skill before those which 
come under the designation of archaic, may, if he 
likes, admire the following.' 1 As a natural result, 
a fashion came in of imitating them, and we have, 
especially in Italy, many statues in this style which 
seem certainly to be modern imitations, and not even 
Greek copies of old Greek originals. 

But here at Orchomenus — a country which was so 
decayed as to lose almost all its population two centuries 
before Christ, where no amateurs of art would stay, 
and where Plutarch was, as it were, the last remains 
in his town of literature and respectability — here there 
is no danger whatever of finding this spurious work j 
and thus here, as indeed all through Greece, archaic 
work is thoroughly trustworthy. But the unfortunate 
law of the land not often violated, as in this case, — 
which insists upon all these relics, however isolated, 
being kept in their place of finding — is the mightiest 
obstacle to the study of this interesting phase of 
culture, and we must depend on the Hellenic Society's 
gallery of photographs, from which we can make safe 
observations. The Greeks will tell you that the pre- 
servation of antiquities in their original place, first of 
all, gives the inhabitants an interest in them (which 
might be true, but that there are very often no inhabit- 
ants) j and next, that it encourages travelling in the 
country. This also is true \ but surely the making 

1 5<rrtj $h tSl <rfn> t£x v V TreiroirjjjJva ^vlirpoade riOerat twp is 
d/>X<u6ipa i}K6vT<tiv t ko.1 rdde iarw ol de&<ra<rdcu (i. 24. 3). 



ix CRLERONEA 219 



of decent roads, and the establishing of decent inns, 
and easy communications, are necessary, before the 
second stimulus can have its effect. 

Not far from this little church and its famous 
relief, we came in sight of the Acropolis (called 
Petrachus) of Chaeronea, and soon arrived at the 
town, so celebrated through all antiquity, in spite of 
its moderate size. The fort on the rock is, indeed, 
very large — perhaps the largest we saw in Greece, 
with the exception of that at Corinth ; and, as usual 
in these buildings, follows the steepest escarpments, 
raising the natural precipice by a coping of beautiful 
ashlar masonry. The artificial wall is now not more 
than four or five feet high j but even so, there are 
only two or three places where it is at all easy to 
enter the enclosure, which is fully a mile of straggling 
outline on the rock. The view from this fort is very 
interesting. Commanding all the plain of the lake 
Copais, it also gives a view of the sides of Parnassus, 
and of the passes into Phocis, which cannot be seen 
till the traveller reaches this point. Above all, it 
looks out upon the gap of Elatea, about ten miles 
north-west, through which the eye catches glimpses 
of secluded valleys in northern Phocis. 

This gap is, indeed, the true key of this side of 
Boeotia, and is no mere mountain pass, but a narrow 
plain, perhaps a mile wide, which must have afforded 
an easy transit for an army. But the mountains on 
both sides are tolerably steep, and so it was necessary 
to have a fortified town, as Elatea was, to keep the 
command of the place. As we gazed through the 
narrow plain, the famous passage of Demosthenes 
came home to us, which begins : c It was evening, 
and the news came in that Philip had seized, and 
was fortifying Elatea.' The nearest point of obser- 
vation or of control was the rock of Chaeronea, and 



220 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

we may say with certainty that it was from here the 
first breathless messenger set out with the terrible 
news. This, too, was evidently the pass through which 
Agesilaus came on his return from Asia, and on his 
way to Coronea, where his great battle was fought, 
close by the older trophy of the Theban victory over 
Tolmides. 1 

Having surveyed the view, and fatigued ourselves 
greatly by our climb in the summer heat, we de- 
scended to the old theatre, cut into the rock where 
it ascends from the village — the smallest and steepest 
Greek theatre I had ever seen. Open-air buildings 
always look small for their size, but most of those 
erected by the Greeks and Romans were so large that 
nothing could dwarf them. Even the theatre of such 
a town as Taormina in Sicily — which can never have 
been populous — is, in addition to its enchanting site, 
a very majestic structure ; I will not speak of the 
immense theatres of Megalopolis and of Syracuse. 
But this little place at Chaeronea, so steep that the 
spectators sat immediately over one another, looked 
almost amusing when cut in the solid rock, after the 
manner of its enormous brethren. The guide-book 
says it is one of the most ancient theatres in Greece — 
why, I know not. It seems to me rather to have 
been made when the population was diminishing ; 
and any rudeness which it shows arises more from 
economy than want of experience. 

But, small as it is, there are few more interesting 
places than the only spot in Chaeronea where we can 
say with certainty that here Plutarch sat — a man 
who, living in an age of decadence, and in a country 
village of no importance, has, nevertheless, as much as 
any of his countrymen, made his genius felt over all 
the world. Apart' from the great stores of history 

1 Cf. Plut. Agesilaus, cap. xvii. 



ix CHiERONEA 221 

brought together in his Lives^ which, indeed, are 
frequently our only source for the inner life and spirit 
of the greatest Greeks of the greatest epochs — the 
moral effect of these splendid biographies, both on 
poets and politicians through Europe, can hardly be 
overrated. From Shakespeare and Alneri to the wild 
savages of the French Revolution, all kinds of patriots 
and eager spirits have been fascinated and excited by 
these wonderful portraits. Alneri even speaks of them 
as the great discovery of his life, which he read with 
tears and with rage. There is no writer of the Silver 
Age who gives us anything like so much valuable 
information about earlier authors, and their general 
character. More especially the inner history of 
Athens in her best days, the personal features of 
Pericles, Cimon, Alcibiades, Nicias, as well as of 
Themistocles and of Aristides, would be completely, 
or almost completely, lost, if this often despised but 
invaluable man had not written for our learning. 
And he is still more essentially a good man — a man 
better and purer than most Greeks — another Herodotus 
in fairness and in honesty. A poor man reputed by 
his neighbours c a terrible historian,' remarked to a 
friend of mine, who used to lend him Scott's novels, 
c that Scott was a great historian,' and being asked his 
reason, replied, c He makes you to love your kind.' 
There is a deep significance in this vague utterance, 
in which it may be eminently applied to Plutarch. 
' Here in Chaeronea,' says Pausanias, c they prepare 
unguents from the flowers of the lily and the rose, the 
narcissus and the iris. These are balm for the pains 
of men. Nay, that which is made of roses, if old 
wooden images are anointed with it, saves them,, too, 
from decay.' He little knew how eternally true his 
words would be, for though the rose and the iris grow 
wild and neglected, and yield not now their perfume 



222 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

to soothe the ills of men, yet from Chaeronea comes 
the eternal balm of Plutarch's wisdom, to sustain the 
oppressed, to strengthen the patriot, to purify with 
nobler pity and terror the dross of human meanness. 
Nay, even the crumbling images of his gods arrest 
their decay by the spirit of his morals, and revive their 
beauty in the sweetness of his simple faith. 

There is a rich supply of water, bursting from an 
old Greek fountain, near the theatre — indeed, the 
water supply all over this country is excellent. 
There is also an old marble throne in the church, 
about which they have many legends, but no history. 
The costume of the girls, whom we saw working in 
small irrigated plots near the houses, was more beauti- 
ful than that in other Greek towns. They wore 
splendid necklaces of gold and silver coins, which lay 
like corselets of chain mail on the neck and breast ; 
and the dull but rich embroidery of wool on their 
aprons and bodices was quite beyond what we could 
describe, but not beyond our highest appreciation. 

As the day was waning, we were obliged to leave 
this most interesting place, and set off again on our 
ride home to Lebadea. We had not gone a mile 
from the town when we came upon the most pathetic 
and striking of all the remains in that country — the 
famous lion of Chaeronea, which the Thebans set up 
to their countrymen who had fallen in the great battle 
against Philip of Macedon, in the year 338 B.C. We 
had been looking out for this monument, and on our 
way to Chaeronea, seeing a lofty mound in the plain, 
rode up to it eagerly, hoping to find the lion. But 
we were disappointed, and were told that the history 
of this larger mound was completely unknown. It 
evidently commemorates some battle, and is a mound 
over the dead, but whether those slain by Sylla, or 
those with Tolmides, or those of some far older con- 



ix CH^ERONEA 223 

flict, no man can say. It seems, however, perfectly 
undisturbed, and grown about with deep weeds and 
brushwood, so that a hardy excavator might find it 
worth opening, and, perhaps, coins might tell us of 
its age. 

The mound where we found the lion was much 
humbler and smaller, in fact hardly a mound at all, 
but a rising knoll, with its centre hollowed out, and 
in the hollow the broken pieces of the famous lion. 
It had sunk, we are told, into its mound of earth, 
originally intended to raise it above the road beside, 
and lay there in perfect safety till last century, 
when four English travellers claim to have dis- 
covered it (June 3, 1818). They tried to get it 
removed, and, failing in their efforts, covered up the 
pieces carefully, 1 which seem since that time to have 
lain undisturbed till recent years. It is of bluish-grey 
stone, — they call it Boeotian marble or limestone, — and 
is a work of the highest and purest merit. The lion 
is of that Asiatic type which has little or no mane, 
and seemed to us couchant or sitting in attitude, with 
the head not lowered to the fore paws, but thrown 
up. 2 The expression of the face is ideally perfect — 

1 An account of the discovery, by a member of the party, Mr. G. 
L. Taylor, has been published by Mr. W. S. Vaux in the Trans, of 
the Roy. Soc. of Lit., 2nd series, vol. viii. pp. i sqq. The latter gentle- 
man called attention to his paper when the subject was being dis- 
cussed in the Academy in 1877. A very different story was told 
to Colonel Mure, and has passed from his Travels into Murray's 
Guide. The current belief among the Greeks seems still to be that a 
Greek patriot called Odysseus, perceiving the stone protruding from 
the clay, and, on striking it, hearing its hollow ring, dug it out and 
broke it in pieces, imagining it to be a record of Philip's victory over 
Hellenic liberty. Some ill-natured people added that he hoped to find 
treasure within it. 

a Mr. Taylor and his friends thought it must have stood in the 
attitude of the now abolished lion on Northumberland House. This 
did not appear so to us 5 but it is difficult to decide. The restoration by 
Siegel in the Mon. of the Soc. Arch, of Rome, for 1856, of which Mr. 



224 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

rage, grief, and shame are expressed in it, together 
with that noble calmness and moderation which 
characterise all good Greek art. The object of the 
monument is quite plain, without reading the affect- 
ing, though simple, notice of Pausanias : c On the 
approach to the city,' says he, c is the tomb of the 
Boeotians who fell in the battle with Philip. It has 
no inscription j but the image of a lion is placed 
upon it as an emblem of the spirit of these men. 
The inscription has been omitted — I suppose, because 
the gods had willed that their fortune should not be 
equal to their valour.' So, then, we have here, in 
what may fairly be called a dated record, one of the 
finest specimens of the sepulchral monuments of the 
best age of Greece. 

As we saw it, on a splendid afternoon in June, it 
lay in perfect repose and oblivion, the fragments large 
enough to tell the contour and the style ; in the 
mouth of the upturned head wild bees were busy at 
their work, and the honeycomb was there between its 
teeth. The Hebrew story came fresh upon us, and 
we longed for the strength which tore the lion of old, 
to gather the limbs and heal the rents of his marble 
fellow. The lion of Samson was a riddle to the 
Philistines which they could not solve ; and so I 
suppose this lion of Chaeronea was a riddle, too — a 
deeper riddle to better men — why the patriot should 
fall before the despot, and the culture of Greece before 
the Caesarism of Macedonia. Even within Greece, 
there is no want of remarkable parallels. This, the 
last effulgence of the setting sun of Greek liberty, 
was commemorated by a lion and a mound, as the 

A. S. Murray most kindly sent me a drawing, makes the posture a 
sitting one, like that of the sitting lion in front of the Arsenal at 
Venice. There is a small sitting lion from Calymnae, of the same 
posture, in the British Museum. 



ix CHAERONEA 225 

opening struggle at Marathon was also marked by a 
lion and a mound. At Marathon the mound is there 
and the lion gone ; at Chaeronea the lion is there and 
the mound gone. 1 But doubtless the earlier lion was 
far inferior in expression and in beauty, and was a 
small object on so large a tomb. Later men made 
the sepulchre itself of less importance, and the poetic 
element more prominent ; and perhaps this very fact tells 
the secret of their failure, and why the refined sculptor 
of the lion was no equal in politics and war to the 
rude carver of the relief of the Marathonian warrior. 

These and such like thoughts throng the mind of 
him who sits beside the solitary tomb ; and it may be 
said in favour of its remoteness and difficulty of access, 
that in solitude there is at least peace and leisure, and 
the scattered objects of interest are scanned with 
affection and with care. 

When I returned to the scene in 1905, a great 
disappointment awaited me. From the railway station 
at Chaeronea one sees at some distance a tall monument 
standing by the roadside, surrounded with an iron 
railing. Here, on a narrow stone pedestal, instead of 
his old broad mound, the unfortunate lion has been set 
up, apparently trying to keep his balance by sitting 
backward as no lion in nature ever sat. This 
ludicrous effect is produced by making or setting his 
forelegs too high. The grief and shame which we 
had felt in the noble head is still there, but is now 
rather at his own ridiculous posture on a pillar, than 
at the defeat of the freemen of Greece. 

1 Since these words were written, the labours of the Greek archaeo- 
logists have discovered the great polyandrion, or common tomb of the 
dead, which the lion commemorated. They lay in rows, many of 
them with broken bones, showing how they had received their death- 
wound, and with them were fragments of broken weapons. Never have 
we come closer to an ancient battle, or discovered more affecting records 
of a great struggle. 

Q 



CHAPTER X 

ARACHOVA — DELPHI THE BAY OF KIRRHA 

The pilgrim who went of old from Athens to the 
shrine of Delphi, to consult the august oracle on some 
great difficulty in his own life, or some great danger 
to his country, saw before him the giant Parnassus as 
his goal, as soon as he reached the passes of Cithaeron. 
For two or three days he went across Bceotia with this 
great landmark before him, but it was not till he 
reached Lebadea or Daulis that he found himself 
leaving level roads, and entering defiles, where great 
cliffs and narrow glens gave to his mind a tone of 
superstition and of awe which ever dwelt around that 
wild and dangerous country. Starting from Lebadea, 
or, by another road, from Chaeronea (by Daulis), he 
must go about half-way round Parnassus, from its east 
to its south-west aspect ; and this can only be done 
by threading his way along torrents and precipices, 
mounting steep ascents, and descending into wild 
glens. This journey among the Alps of Phocis is 
perhaps the most beautiful in all Greece — certainly, 
with the exception of the journey from Olympia 
over Mount Erymanthus, the most beautiful of all 
the routes known to me through the highlands. 

The old priests of Delphi, who were the first 
systematic road-builders among the Greeks, had made 
a careful way from Thebes into Phocis, for the use 

226 



chap.x THE ROAD TO DELPHI 227 

of the pilgrims thronging to their shrine. It appears 
that, by way of saving the expense of paving it all, 
they laid down in some way a double wheel-track 
or fixed track, upon which chariots could run with 
safety ; but we hear from the oldest times of the 
unpleasantness of two vehicles meeting on this road, 
and of the disputes that took place as to which of 
them should turn aside into the deep mud. 1 We may 
infer from this that the lot of pedestrians cannot have 
been very pleasant. Now, all these difficulties have 
vanished with the road itself. There are nothing but 
faintly marked bridle-paths, often indicated only by 
the solitary telegraph wires, which reach over the 
mountains, apparently for no purpose whatever ; and 
all travellers must ride or walk in single file, if they 
will not force their way through brakes or woods. 

These wild mountains do not strike the mind with 
the painful feeling of desolation which is produced by 
the abandoned plains. At no time can they have 
supported a large population, and we may suppose 
that they never contained more than scattered hamlets 
of shepherds, living, as they now do, in deep brown 
hairy tents of hides at night, and wandering along 
the glens by day, in charge of great herds of quaint- 
looking goats with long beards and spiral horns. The 
dull tinkling of their bells, and the eagle's yelp, are 
the only sounds which give variety to the rushing of 
the wind through the dark pines, and the falling of the 
torrent from the rocks. It is a country in which the 
consciousness grows not of solitude, but of smallness 
— a land of vast form and feature, meet dwelling for 
mysterious god and gloomy giant, but far too huge for 
mortal man. 

1 This seems to be implied in the account of the murder of Laius by 
CEdipus, on this very road, as it is described in Sophocles's CEdipus 
Tyrannux. 



228 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

Our way lay directly for Delphi, but through the 
curious town of Arachova, which is perched on the 
slope of precipices, some 3000 feet or more above 
the level of the sea. We rode from eight in the 
morning till the evening twilight to reach this 
place, and all the day through scenes which gave 
us each moment some new delight and some new 
astonishment, but which could only be described 
by the brush of a Turner. It is the misfortune 
of such descriptions on paper, that the writer alone 
has the remembered image before him ; no reader 
can grasp the detail, and frame for himself a faithful 
picture. 

We felt that we were approaching Arachova when 
we saw the steep slopes above and below our path 
planted with vineyards, and here and there a woman 
in her gay dress working on the steep incline, where 
a stumble might have sent her rolling many hundreds 
of feet into some torrent bed. At one particular spot, 
where the way turned round a projecting shoulder, 
we were struck by seeing at the same time, to the 
north, the blue sea under Euboea, and, at the south, 
the Gulf of Corinth where it nears Delphi — both 
mere patches among the mountains, like the little 
tarns among the Irish moors, but both great historic 
waters — old high roads of commerce and of culture. 
From any of the summits, such a view from sea to 
sea would not be the least remarkable •> but it was 
interesting and unusual to see it from a mule's back 
on one of the high roads of the country. A moment 
later, the houses of Arachova itself attracted all our 
attention, lying as they did over against us, and quite 
near, but with a great gulf between us and them, 
which took an hour to ride round. The town 
has a curious, scattered appearance, with interrupted 
streets and uncertain plan, owing not only to the 



x ARACHOVA 229 

extraordinary nature of the site, but to the fact that 
huge boulders, I might say rocks, have been shaken 
loose by earthquakes from above, and have come 
tumbling into the middle of the town. They crush 
a house or two, and stand there in the street. 
Presently some one comes and builds a house 
up against the side of this rock ; others venture in 
their turn, and so the town recovers itself, till another 
earthquake makes another rent. Since 1870 these 
earthquakes have been very frequent. At first they 
were very severe, and ruined almost all the town ; 
but now they are very slight, and so frequent that we 
were assured (in 1887) that they happened at some 
hour every day. In recent years the disturbance seems 
to have abated. But the whole region of Parnassus 
shows great scars and wounds from this awful natural 
scourge. 

Arachova is remarkable as being one of the very 
few towns of Greece of any note which is not built 
upon a celebrated site. Everywhere the modern 
Greek town is a mere survival of the old. I re- 
member but three exceptions — Arachova, Hydra, and 
Tripolitza, 1 and of these the latter two arose from 
special and known circumstances. The prosperity of 
Arachova is not so easily explicable. In spite of its 
wonderful and curious site, the trade of the place is, 
for a Greek town, very considerable. The wines 
which they make are of the highest repute, though 
to us the free use of resin makes them all equally 
worthless. Besides, they worked beautifully patterned 
rugs of divers-coloured wool — rugs which are sold at 
high prices all over the Greek waters. They are used 
in boats, on saddles, on beds — in fact for every possible 
rough use. The patterns are stitched on with wool, 

1 Indeed Tripolitza lies between the ancient sites of Mantinea and 
Tegea, and quite close to the latter. 



230 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

and the widths sewn together in the same way, with 
effective rudeness. 1 

We had an excellent opportunity of seeing all this 
sort of work, as we found the town in some excite- 
ment at an approaching marriage ; and we went to 
see the bride, whom we found in a spacious room, 
with low wooden rafters, in the company of a large 
party of her companions, and surrounded on all sides 
by her dowry, which consisted, in eastern fashion, 
almost altogether of c changes of raiment.' All round 
the room these rich woollen rugs lay in great piles, 
and from the low ceiling hung in great numbers 
her future husband's white petticoats ; for in that 
country, as everywhere in Greece, the men wear the 
petticoats. The company were all dressed in full 
costume — white sleeves, embroidered woollen aprons, 
gold and silver coins about the neck, and a bright red 
loose belt worn low round the figure. To complete 
the picture, each girl had in her left hand a distaff, 
swathed about with rich, soft white wool, from 
which her right hand and spindle were deftly spinning 
thread, as she walked about the room admiring the 
trousseau, and joking with us and with her com- 
panions. The beauty of the Arachovite women is 
as remarkable as the strength and longevity of the 
men, nor do I know any mountaineers equal to them, 
except those of some valleys in the Tyrol. But there, 
as is well known, beauty is chiefly confined to the 
men ; at Arachova it seemed fairly distributed. We 
did not see any one girl of singular beauty. The 
average was remarkably high ; and, as might be 
expected, they were not only very fair, but of that 

1 In 1905 I found the colours of these rugs changed into tawdry and 
vulgar tones, so that the industry, artistically at least, is ruined. An 
intelligent Government ought surely to save their peasants from this 
misfortune, and reintroduce the old models. 



x A PYRRHIC DANCE 231 

peculiarly clear complexion, and vigorous frame, which 
seem almost always to be found when a good climate 
and pure air are combined with a very high level 
above the sea. 

We saw, moreover, what they called a Pyrrhic 
dance, which consisted of a string of people, hand-in- 
hand, standing in the form of a spiral, and moving 
rhythmically, while the outside member of the train 
performed curious and violent gymnastics. The 
music consisted in the squealing of a horrible clarion- 
ette, accompanied by the beating of a large drum. 
The clarionette-player had a leathern bandage about 
his mouth, like that which we see in the ancient 
reliefs and pictures of double-flute-players. According 
as each principal dancer was fatigued, he passed off 
from the end of the spiral line, and stuck a silver coin 
between the cap and forehead of the player. The 
whole motion was extremely slow throughout the 
party — the centre of the coil, which is often occupied 
by little children, hardly moving at all, and paying 
little attention to the dance. 

In general, the Greek music which I heard — dance 
music, and occasional shepherds' songs — was nothing 
but a wild and monotonous chant, with two or three 
shakes and ornaments on a high note, running down 
to a long drone note at the end. They repeat these 
phrases, which are not more than three bars long, 
over and over again, with some slight variations of 
appoggiatura. I was told by competent people at 
Athens, that all this was not properly Greek, but 
Turkish, and that the long slavery of the Greeks had 
completely destroyed the traditions of their ancient 
music. Though this seemed certainly true of the 
music which 1 heard, I very much doubt that any 
ancient feature so general can have completely dis- 
appeared. When there are national songs of a dis- 



232 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

tinctly Greek character transmitted all through the 
Slavish and Turkish periods, it seems odd that they 
should be sung altogether to foreign music. Without 
more careful investigation I should be slow to decide 
upon such a question. Unfortunately, our specimens 
of old Greek music are very few, and probably very 
insignificant, all the extant works on music by the 
ancients being devoted to theoretical questions, which 
are very difficult and not very profitable. To this 
subject I have devoted a special discussion in my 
Social Life in Greece^ with what illustration it is now 
possible to obtain. 

The inhabitants wished us to stay with them some 
days, which would have given us an opportunity of 
witnessing the wedding ceremony, and also of making 
excursions to the snowy tops of Mount Parnassus. 
But we had had enough of that sort of amusement in 
a climb up Mount iEtna, a short time before, and the 
five hours' toiling on the snow in a thick fog was too 
fresh in our memory. Besides, we were bound to 
catch the weekly steamer at Itea, as the port of Delphi 
is now called ; and eight additional days, or rather 
nights, in this country might have been too much for 
the wildest enthusiasm. For the wooden houses of 
Arachova are beyond all other structures infested with 
life, and not even the balconies in the frosty night air 
were safe from insect invasions. Moreover, the streets 
were rough and dirty beyond description, and this 
remains of barbarism had not disappeared, nay, it was 
not even mitigated, when we revisited the place in 
1905. Until the Greeks begin to feel that such 
streets are disgraceful, they will make no progress in 
civilisation. 

We therefore started early in the morning, and 
kept along the sides of precipices on our way to the 
oracle of Delphi. It is not wonderful that the 



x DELPHI 233 

Arachovites should be famous for superstitions and 
legends, and that the inquirers into the remnants of 
old Greek beliefs in the present day have found their 
richest harvest in this mountain fastness, where there 
seems no reason why any belief should ever die out. 
More especially the faith in the terrible god of the 
dead, Charos, who represents not only the old Charon, 
but Pluto also, is here very deep-seated, and many 
Arachovite songs and ballads speak of his awful and 
relentless visits. Longevity is so usual, and old age is 
so hale and green in these Alps, that the death of the 
young comes home with far greater force and pathos 
here than in unhealthy or immoral societies, and thus 
the inroads of Charos are not borne in sullen silence, 
but lamented with impatient complaints. 

At eleven o'clock, we came, in the fierce summer 
sun, to the ascent into the 'rocky Pytho,' where the 
terraced city of old had harboured pilgrims from every 
corner of the civilised world. The ordinary histories 
which we read give us but little idea of the mighty 
influence of this place in the age of its faith. We 
hear of its being consulted by Croesus, or by the 
Romans, and we appreciate its renown for sanctity ; 
but until of very late years there was small account 
taken of its political and commercial importance. 
The date of its first rise is hidden in remote antiquity. 
As the story goes, a shepherd, who fed his flocks here, 
observed the goats, when they approached the vaporous 
cavern, springing about madly, as if under some strange 
influence. He came up to see the place himself, and 
was immediately seized with the prophetic frenzy. 
So the reputation of the place spread, first around the 
neighbouring pastoral tribes, and then to a wider 
sphere. 

This very possible origin, however, does not dis- 
tinctly assert what may certainly be inferred — I mean 



234 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

the existence of some older and ruder worship, before 
the worship of Apollo was here established. Two 
arguments make this clear. In the first place, old 
legends consistently speak of the arrival of Apollo 
here ; of his conflict with the powers of earth, under 
the form of the dragon Python ; of his having under- 
gone purification for its murder, and having been 
formally ceded possession by its older owners. This 
distinct allusion to a previous cult, and one even 
hostile to Apollo, but ultimately reconciled with him, 
is sustained by the fact that Pausanias describes in the 
Temple of Apollo itself two old stones — one apparently 
an aerolith — which were treated with great respect, 
anointed daily with oil, and adorned with garlands of 
flowers. One of these was to the Greeks the centre 
of the earth (o^aAos), and beside it were two eagles 
in gold, to remind one of the legend that Zeus had 
started two eagles from the ends of the earth, and that 
they met at this exact spot midway. These rude and 
shapeless stones, which occur elsewhere in Greek 
temples, point to the older stage of fetish-worship, 
before the Greeks had risen to the art of carving a 
statue, or of worshipping the unseen deity without a 
gross material symbol. 

Homer speaks in the Iliad of the great wealth of 
the Pythian shrine; and the Hymn to the Pythian 
Apollo implies that its early transformations were 
completed. But seeing that the god Apollo, though 
originally an Ionian god, as at Delos, was here wor- 
shipped distinctively by the Dorians, we shall not err 
if we consider the rise of the oracle to greatness 
coincident with the rise and spreading of the Dorians 
over Greece — an event to which we can assign no 
date, but which, in legend, comes next after the 
Trojan War, and seems near the threshold of real history. 
The absolute submission of the Spartans, when they 



x DELPHI 235 

rose to power, confirmed the authority of the shrine, 
and so it gradually came to be the Metropolitan See, 
so to speak, in the Greek religious world. It seems 
that the influence of this oracle was, in old days, 
always used in the direction of good morals and of 
enlightenment. When neighbouring states were 
likely to quarrel, the oracle was often a peacemaker, 
and even acted as arbitrator — a course usual in earlier 
Greek history, and in which they anticipated the best 
results of our nineteenth-century culture. So again, 
when excessive population demanded an outlet, the oracle 
was consulted as to the proper place, and the proper 
leader to be selected; and all the splendid commercial 
development of the sixth century B.C., though not pro- 
duced, was at least sanctioned and promoted, by the 
Delphic Oracle. Again, in determining the worship 
of other gods and the founding of new services to 
great public benefactors, the oracle seems to have 
been the acknowledged authority — thus taking the 
place of the Vatican in Catholic Europe, as the source 
and origin of new dogmas, and of new worships and 
formularies. 

At the same time the treasure-house of the shrine 
was the largest and safest of banks, where both in- 
dividuals and states might deposit treasure, and from 
which they could also borrow money, at fair interest, 
in times of war and public distress. The rock of 
Delphi was held to be the navel or centre of the earth's 
surface, and certainly in a social and religious sense 
this was the case for all the Greek world. Thus the 
priests were informed, by perpetual visitors from all 
sides, of all the latest news — of the general aspect of 
politics — of the new developments of trade — of the 
strange discoveries in outlying and barbarous lands — 
and were accordingly able, without any genius or 
supernatural inspiration, to form their judgments upon 



236 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

wider experience and better knowledge than anybody- 
else could command. This advice, which was gener- 
ally sound and well-considered, was given to people 
who took it to be divine, and acted upon it with 
implicit faith and zeal. Of course the result was in 
general satisfactory j and so even individuals made use 
of it as a sort of high confessional, to which they came 
as pilgrims at some important crisis of their life ; and 
finding by the response that the god seemed to know 
all about the affairs of every city, went away fully 
satisfied with the divine authority of the oracle. 

This general reputation was not affected by occa- 
sional rumours of bribed responses or of dishonest 
priestesses. Such things must happen everywhere ; 
but, as Lord Bacon long ago observed, human nature 
is more affected by affirmatives than negatives — that 
is to say, a few cases of brilliantly accurate prophecy 
will outweigh a great number of cases of doubtful 
advices or even of acknowledged corruption. So the 
power of the Popes has lasted in some respects un- 
diminished to the present day, and they are still 
regarded by many as infallible, even though historians 
have published many dreadful lives of some of them, and 
branded them as men of worse than average morals. 

The national importance of the Delphic Oracle 
lasted from the invasion of the Dorians down to the 
Persian War, certainly more than three centuries ; 
but the part which it took in the latter struggle gave 
it a blow from which it seems never to have recovered. 
When the invasion of Xerxes was approaching, the 
Delphic priests, informed accurately of the immense 
power of the Persians, made up their minds that all 
resistance was useless, and counselled absolute sub- 
mission or flight. According to all human probabili- 
ties they were right, for nothing but a series of 
blunders could possibly have checked the Persians. 



x DELPHI 237 

But surely the god ought to have inspired them to 
utter patriotic responses, and thus to save themselves 
in case of such a miracle as actually happened. I 
cannot but suspect that they hoped to gain the favour 
of Xerxes, and remain under him what they had 
hitherto been, a wealthy and protected corporation. 1 
Perhaps they even saw too far, and perceived that the 
success of the Greeks would bring the Ionic states 
into prominence ; but we must not credit them with 
too much. The result, however, told greatly against 
them. The Greeks won, and the Athenians got the 
lead, — the Athenians, who very soon developed a 
secular and worldly spirit, and who were by no means 
awed by responses which had threatened them and 
weakened their hands, when their own courage and 
skill had brought them deliverance. And we can 
imagine even Themistocles, not to speak of Pericles 
and Antiphon, looking upon the oracles as little more 
than a convenient way of persuading the mob to 
follow a policy which it was not able to understand. 
The miraculous defeat of the Persians by the god, who 
repeated his wonders when the Gauls attacked his 
shrine, should be read in Herodotus and in Pausanias. 
It is with some sadness that we turn from the 
splendid past of Delphi to its miserable present. The 
sacred cleft in the earth, from which rose the cold 
vapour that intoxicated the priestess, is blocked up 
and lost. As it lay within the shrine of the temple, it 
may have been filled by the falling ruins, or still more 
completely destroyed by an earthquake. But, apart 
from these natural possibilities, we are told that the 
Christians, after the oracle was closed by Theodosius, 

1 This was done by the monks of Athos, when Mahomet II. was 
threatening Constantinople. They foresaw his victory, and by early 
submission made their own terms, and saved both their liberties and their 
property. 



238 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

filled up and effaced the traces of what they thought 
a special entrance to hell, where communications had 
been held with the Evil One. 

The three great fountains or springs of the town 
are still in existence. The first and most striking of 
these bursts out from between the Phaedriades — two 
shining peaks, which stand up a thousand feet over 
Delphi, and so close together as to leave only a dark 
and mysterious gorge or fissure, not twenty feet wide, 
intervening. The aspect of these twin peaks, so 
celebrated by the Greek poets, with their splendid 
stream, the Castalian fount, bursting from between 
them, is indeed grand and startling. A great square 
bath is cut in the rock, just at the mouth of the 
gorge ; but the earthquake of 1870, which made such 
havoc of Arachova, has been busy here also, and has 
tumbled a huge block into this bath, thus covering 
the old work, as well as several votive niches cut into 
the rocky wall. This was the place where arriving 
pilgrims purified themselves with hallowed water. 

In the great old days the oracle gave responses on 
the seventh of each month, and even then, only when 
the sacrifices were favourable. If the victims were not 
perfectly without blemish, they could not be offered ; 
if they did not tremble all over when brought to the 
altar, the day was thought unpropitious. The inquirers 
entered the great temple in festal dress, with olive 
garlands and stemmata^ or fillets of wool, led by the 
00-fcCH, or sacred guardians of the temple, who were five 
of the noblest citizens of Delphi. The priestesses, on 
the contrary, — there were three at the same time, who 
officiated in turn, — though Delphians also, were not 
frequently of noble family. When the priestess was 
placed on the sacred tripod by the chief interpreter, 
or 7r/)o^TrySj over the exhalations, she was seized with 
frenzy — often so violent that the 00-101 were known to 



x DELPHI— THE ORACLE 239 

have fled in terror, and she herself to have become 
insensible, and to have died. Her ravings in this state 
were carefully noted down, and then reduced to sense, 
and of old always to verses, by the attendant priests, 
who of course interpreted disconnected words with a 
special reference to the politics of the day or the circum- 
stances of the inquirers. 

This was done in early days with perfect good faith. 
During the decline of religion there were of course 
many cases of corruption and of partiality, and, indeed, 
the whole style and dignity of the oracle gradually 
decayed with the decay of Greece. Presently, when 
crowds came, and states were extremely jealous of the 
right of precedence in inquiring of the god, it was 
found expedient to give responses every day, and this 
was done to private individuals, and even for trivial 
reasons. So also the priests no longer took the trouble 
to shape the responses into verse ; and when the 
Phocians in the sacred war (355-46 B.C.) seized the 
treasures, and applied to military purposes some 10,000 
talents, the shrine suffered a blow from which it never 
recovered. Still, the quantity of splendid votive offer- 
ings which were not convertible into ready money 
made it the most interesting place in Greece, next to 
Athens and Olympia, for lovers of the arts ; and the 
statues, tripods, and other curiosities described there by 
Pausanias, give a wonderful picture of the mighty 
oracle even in its decay. 1 The greatest sculptors, 
painters, and architects had lavished their labour upon 
the buildings. Though Nero had carried off 500 
bronze statues, the traveller estimated the remaining 
works of art at 3000, and yet these seem to have been 
almost all statues, and not to have included tripods, 
pictures, and other gifts. The Emperor Constantine 

1 Cf. also Plutarch's tract de Pyth. orac. for details of ciceroni and 
visitors in his day. 



240 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

brought away (330 a.d.) a great number to adorn his 
capital — more especially the bronze tripod, formed of 
three intertwined serpents, with their heads supporting 
a golden vessel, which Pausanias, the Spartan King, 
had dedicated as the leader of Greece to commemorate 
the great victory over Xerxes. This tripod (which 
was found standing in its place at Constantinople by 
our soldiers in 1852) contains the list of the states which 
took part, according to the account of Herodotus, who 
describes its dedication, and who saw it at Delphi. 

When the Emperor Julian, the last great champion 
of paganism, desired to consult the oracle on his way 
to Persia, in 362 a.d., it replied : c Tell the king the 
fair-wrought dwelling has sunk into the dust : Phcebus 
has no longer a shelter or a prophetic laurel, neither 
has he a speaking fountain ; the fair water is dried up.' 
Thus did the shrine confess, even to the ardent and 
hopeful Julian, that its power had passed away, and, as 
it were by a supreme effort, declared to him the great 
truth which he refused to see — that paganism was gone 
for ever, and a new faith had arisen for the nations of 
the Roman Empire. 

About the year 390, Theodosius took the god at his 
word, and closed the oracle finally. The temple — 
with its cella of 100 feet — with its Doric and Ionic 
pillars — with its splendid sculptures upon the pediments 
— sank into decay and ruin. The walls and porticos 
tumbled down the precipitous cliffs ; the prophetic 
chasm was filled up by the Christians with fear and 
horror ; and, as if to foil any attempt to recover the 
site and plan, the modern Greeks built their miserable 
hamlet of Castri upon the spot ; so that till yesterday 
it was only among the walls and foundations laid bare 
by earthquakes that we could seek for marble capitals 
and votive inscriptions. 

Now, after sundry smaller attempts, the whole 



x DELPHI— THE SANCTUARY 241 

problem has been attacked and solved by the enlightened 
liberality of the French Government together with the 
competent zeal of M. Homolle and his pupils of the 
French school at Athens. The revelation of Delphi, 
though the results are only partially made public, will 
stand beside the revelation of Olympia by the Germans, 
and cannot but suggest comparisons with the want of 
interest shown by English politicians in these splendid 
discoveries. The village of Castri was bought up, body 
and bones, and lifted off the great site to a neighbour- 
ing place, very near, but out of sight. Then the whole 
sacred enclosure (peri bolus) was laid bare and explored, 
and so a series of foundations of votive buildings, a 
crowd of inscriptions, and a museum full of artistic 
remains — statues, friezes, etc., have come to light. 

The whole plan of the sanctuary, with its great 
winding avenue leading up to the temple, once a perfect 
street of national monuments — treasure-houses, colon- 
nades, votive statues, is all manifest. To enter into 
details would require not a chapter in this book but a 
volume. I will also pass by with mere mention that 
below the present road, and therefore below and to the 
east of the sacred enclosure, important remains have 
been found — a Tholos or circular building, a couple of 
temples, a gymnasium, and possibly a treasure house of 
the Phocaeans. The general features worth noting here 
are but few and simple. In the first place, the most 
obtrusive and lofty monuments are those of late and 
comparatively vulgar interest. Close to the great 
temple front is a tall monument set up by the upstart 
king, Prusias of Bithynia ; and in the museum the 
visitor finds restored the triumphal affair dedicated 
by Paullus iEmilius for his victory at Pydna. The 
battle-scenes in the friezes round this monument seem 
to represent encounters between Macedonians and 
barbarians, nor is the Roman infantry to be seen. The 

R 



242 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

explanation of this curious feature is still wanting. 
The second general feature which strikes us in the 
museum is the predominance of archaic and of post- 
classical art, and the scarcity of works of the golden 
age. This is clearly to be accounted for by the thefts 
of Nero, and other Roman plunderers, who were 
quite enough educated to know the superior value of 
Pheidias's or Polycleitus's work, and who left the older 
and newer art as of second-rate importance. When 
the c pre-Raphaelite ' taste of antiquaries like Pausanias 
arose, the worst days of plundering the Greeks were 
gone by. To us, of course, the archaic examples are 
of the highest interest. 

The treasure-house of Cnidos, 1 which has been 
cleverly restored, as far at least as the frieze that ran 
round it, in the extreme left room of the museum, 
gives us our best specimen for a small decorated temple, 
or sacred house, before the end of the sixth century. 
It is such art as the Peisistratids of Athens, or Poly- 
crates of Samos, or Periander of Corinth might have 
commanded. Its ornaments show us" what the builders 
of the Parthenon, one hundred years later, had in the 
way of models, and accordingly that such a composition 
as the frieze of the cella on the Parthenon was no new 
creation, but the maintaining and perfecting of an old 
and great tradition. Almost as great in interest is the 
Treasury of the Athenians, built from the spoils of 
Marathon, and which we may hope to see restored 
in situ, like the temple of Nike on the Acropolis. 

The bronze charioteer, dedicated by Polyzalus, 
brother of the tyrant Gelon of Syracuse, and therefore 
dating from about 500 B.C., is the most important relic 
of all that we have of Greek plastic art, next after the 

1 It is most conveniently so designated, though the attribution is 
uncertain. It may have been the dedication of Siphnos, once a very rich 
island on account of its gold mines. 



x DELPHI— THE CHARIOTEER 243 

Hermes of Praxiteles. The chariot and horses of this 
splendid group are lost, but the arm of an attendant 
boy, and some fragments of the bronze reins show that 
the figure was one of such a group, and dedicated in 
gratitude for the victory in a chariot race. The figure 
is stiff" and sober, the face with little expression, but 
the moulding of the arm and feet and the exquisite 
patina of the surface, show a mastery which any 
modern worker in bronze cannot but envy. The hair is 
short, and bound with a simple fillet, the long garment 
falls in straight folds, just ample enough to remove all 
feeling of tightness ; the attitude is that of a young 
man ready and waiting for the signal of starting. 
This then was the bronze expression corresponding 
to Pindar's Epinikian odes, the art which was his 
rival in celebrating the victories of athletes and the 
splendour of grateful cities and munificent despots. 
Its image was reflected in the eyes of every great 
person in Greek history that beheld it, from Pindar 
to Plutarch, and it only shows the wealth of such 
wonders even in Pausanias's day, that he does not 
mention it in his selection of treasures at Delphi. 

Among the later things are some curious specimens 
of florid taste, which was so rare in Greece. In room IV. 
of the museum we were amazed to see the pillar 
supporting three dancing girls, with a capital very freely 
composed of acanthus leaves, but then the stalk of the 
pillar has acanthus leaves growing out of it at intervals, 
an attempt at novelty not to be commended. This 
vagary seems to date from very early Hellenistic days. 

Reverting to the splendid natural beauty of the 
place, one or two features remain always unchanged. 
The three fine springs, to which Delphi doubtless 
owed its first selection for human habitation, are still 
there — Castalia, of which we have spoken •> Cassotis, 



244 RAMBLES IN GREECE cha* 

which was led artificially into the very shrine of the 
god ; and Delphussa, which was, I suppose, the water 
used for secular purposes by the inhabitants. The 
stadium, too, a tiny racecourse high above the town, in 
the only place where they could find a level 150 yards, is 
now uncovered ; and we see at once what the import- 
ance of games must have been at a sacred Greek town, 
when such a thing as a stadium should be attempted 
here. 1 The earliest competitions had been in music — 
that is, in playing the lyre, in recitation, and probably 
in the composition of original poems ; but presently 
the physical contests of Olympia began to outdo the 
splendour of Delphi. Moreover, the Spartans would 
not compete in minstrelsy, which they liked and 
criticised, but left to professional artists. Accordingly, 
the priests of Delphi were too practical a corporation 
not to widen the programme of their games, and 
Pindar has celebrated the Pythian victors as hardly 
second to those at the grand festival of Elis. 

There is yet one more element in the varied great- 
ness of Delphi. It was here that the religious federation 
of Greece — the Amphictyony of which we hear so 
often — held its meetings alternately with the meetings 
at the springs of Thermopylae. When I stood high 
up on the stadium at Delphi, the great scene described 
by the orator iEschines came fresh upon me, when he 
looked upon the sacred plain of Krissa, and called all 
the worshippers of the god to clear it of the sacrilegious 
Amphissians, who had covered it with cattle and 
growing crops. The plain, he says, is easily surveyed 
from the place of meeting — a statement which shows 
that the latter cannot have been in the town of Delphi ; 
for a great shoulder of the mountain effectually hides 
the whole plain from every part of that town. 

1 The hippodrome for the chariot races, was, however, in the plain 
beneath, as Pausanias tells us (x. 37. 4). 



x KIRRHA 245 

The Pylaea, or place of assembly, was, however, 
outside, and precisely at the other side of this huge 
shoulder, so that what iEschines says is true \ but it 
is not true, as any ordinary student imagines, that he 
was standing in Delphi itself. He was, in fact, com- 
pletely out of sight of the town, though not a mile 
from it. There is no more common error than this 
among our mere book scholars — and I daresay there 
are not many who realise the existence of this sub- 
urban Pylaea, and its situation close to, but invisible 
from, Delphi. It certainly never came home to me 
till I began to look for the spot from which ^Eschines 
might have delivered his famous address. 

When we rode round to the new town of Delphi, 
we found his words amply verified. Far below us 
stretched the plain from Amphissa to Kirrha, at right 
angles with the gorge above which Delphi is situated. 
The river -courses of the Delphic springs form, in 
fact, a regular zigzag. When they tumble from their 
elevation on the rocks into . the valley, they join the 
Pleistus, running at right angles towards the west ; 
when this torrent has reached the plain, it turns again 
due south, and flows into the sea at the Gulf of 
Kirrha. Thus, looking from Pylaea, you see the 
upper part of the plain, and the gorge to the north- 
west of it, where Amphissa occupies its place in a 
position similar to the mouth of the gorge of Delphi. 
The southern rocks of the gorge over against Delphi 
shut out the sea and the actual bay ; but a large rich 
tract, covered with olive-woods, and medlars, and 
oleanders, stretches out beneath the eye — verily a 
plain worth fighting for, and a possession still more 
precious, when it commanded the approach of pilgrims 
from the sea ; for the harbour dues and tolls of Kirrha 
were once a large revenue, and their loss threatened 
the oracle with poverty. This levying of tolls on the 



246 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

pilgrims to Delphi became quite a national question 
in the days of Solon ; it resulted in a great war, led 
by the Amphictyonic Council. Kirrha was ruined, 
and its land dedicated to the god, in order to protect 
the approach from future difficulties. So this great 
tract was, I suppose, devoted to pasture, and the priests 
probably levied a rent from the people who chose to 
graze their cattle on the sacred plain. The Amphis- 
sians, who lived, not at the sea-side, but at the moun- 
tain side of the plain, were never accused of robbing 
or taxing the pilgrims ; but having acquired for many 
generations the right of pasture, they advanced to the 
idea of tilling their pastures, and were undisturbed in 
this privilege, till the mischievous orator, iEschines, 
for his own purposes, fired the Delphians with rage, 
kindled a war, and so brought Philip into Greece. 
These are the historical circumstances which should 
be called to mind by the traveller, who rides down 1 
the steep descent from Delphi to the plain, and then 
turns through the olive-woods to the high road to 
Itea, as the port of Delphi is now called. 

A few hours brought us to the neighbourhood of 
the sea. The most curious feature of this valley, as 
we saw it, was a long string of camels tied together, 
and led by a small and shabby donkey. Our mules 
and horses turned with astonishment to examine these 
animals, which have survived here only, though intro- 
duced by the Turks into many parts of Greece. 

The port of Itea is one of the stations at which 
the Greek coasting steamers now call, and, accord- 
ingly, the place is growing in importance. If a day's 
delay were allowed to let tourists ride up to the old 
seat of the oracle, and if the service were better 
regulated so as to compete in convenience with the 

1 There is now a good carriage-road due to the public spirit of a rich 
and patriotic Greek. 



x ITEA 247 

train journey from Patras to Athens, I suppose no 
traveller going to Greece would choose any other 
route. For he would see all the beautiful coasts of 
Acarnania and iEtolia on the one side, and of Achaia 
on the other ; he could then take Delphi on his way, 
and would land again at Corinth. Here a day, or 
part of a day, should be allowed to see the splendid 
Acro-Corinthus, of which more in another chapter. 
The traveller might thus reach Athens with an 
important part of Greece already visited, and have 
more leisure to turn his attention to the monuments 
and curiosities of that city and of Attica. It is worth 
while to suggest these things, because most men who 
go to Greece find, as I did, that, with some better 
previous information, they could have economised 
both time and money. I can also advise that the 
coasting steamer should be abandoned at Itea, from 
which the traveller can easily get horses to Delphi 
and Arachova, and from thence to Chaeronea, Lebadea, 
and then by train to Athens. So he would arrive there 
by a land tour, which would make him acquainted 
with Bceotia. He might next go by train from 
Athens to Corinth (stopping on the way at Megara), 
and then into the Peloponnese ; going first to 
Mycenae and Argos, and taking another steamer 
round to Sparta, and riding up through Laconia, 
Arcadia, and Elis, so as to come out at Patras, or by 
boat to Zante, where the steamer homewards would 
pick him up. Of course, special excursions through 
Attica, and to the islands, are not included in this 
sketch, as they can easily be made from Athens. 

But surely, no voyage in Greece can be called 
complete which does not include a visit to the famous 
shrine of Delphi, where the wildness and ruggedness 
of nature naturally suggest the powers of earth and 
air, that sway our lives unseen, — where the quaking 



248 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap.x 

soil and the rent rocks speak a strength above the 
strength of mortal man, — and where a great faith, 
based upon his deepest hopes and fears, gained a moral 
empire over all the nation, and exercised it for 
centuries, to the purifying and the ennobling of "the 
Hellenic race. The oracle is long silent, the priestess 
forgotten, the temple is but a ruin, and yet the grand 
responses of that noble shrine are not forgotten, nor 
are they dead. For they have contributed their part 
and added their element to the general advancement 
of the world, and to the emancipation of man from 
immorality and superstition into the true liberty of 
a good and enlightened conscience. 



CHAPTER XI 

ELIS OLYMPIA AND ITS GAMES THE VALLEY OF 

THE ALPHEUS MOUNT ERYMANTHUS PATRAS 

The thousands of visitors, whose ships thronged the 
bay of Katakolo every four years in the great old 
times, cannot have been fairly impressed with the 
beauty of the country at first sight. Most other 
approaches to the coast of Greece are far more strik- 
ing. For although, on a clear day, the mountains 
of Arcadia are plainly visible, and form a fine back- 
ground to the view, from the great bar of Erymanthus 
on the north, round to the top of Lykaeon far south- 
west, the foreground has not, and never had, either 
the historic interest or the beauty of the many bays 
and harbours in other parts of Greece. Yet I am far 
from asserting that it is actually wanting even in this 
respect. As we saw the bay in a quiet summer sun- 
set, with placid water reflecting a sleeping cloud and 
a few idle sails in its amber glow, with a wide circle 
of low hills and tufted shore bathed in a golden haze, 
which spread its curtain of light athwart all the 
distance, so that the great snowy comb of Erymanthus 
seemed suspended by some mystery in the higher 
blue — the view was not indeed very Greek, but still 
it was beautiful, and no unsuitable dress wherein the 
land might clothe itself to welcome the traveller, and 
foretell him its sunny silence and its golden mystery. 

249 



250 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

The carriage-way along the coast passes by sand- 
hills, and sandy fields of vines, which were being 
tilled when we saw them by kindly but squalid 
peasants, some of whom lived in wretched huts of 
skins, enclosed with a rough fence. But these were 
probably only temporary dwellings, for the thrift and 
diligence of the southern Greek seems hardly com- 
patible with real penury. Mendicancy, except in the 
case of little children who do it for the nonce, seems 
unknown in the Morea. 

A dusty ride of two hours, relieved now and then 
for a moment by the intense perfume from the orange 
blossoms of gardens fenced with mighty aloes, brought 
us to the noisy and stirring town of Pyrgos. 1 We 
found this town, one of the most thriving in Greece, 
quite as noisy as Naples in proportion to its size, full 
of dogs barking, donkeys braying, and various shop- 
keepers screaming out their wares — especially frequent 
where young shrill-voiced boys were so employed. 
Nowhere does the ultra-democratic temper of new 
Greek social life show itself more manifestly than in 
these disturbed streets. Not only does every member 
of human society, however young or ill-disposed, let 
his voice be heard without reserve, but it seems to be 
considered an infraction upon liberty to silence yelp- 
ing dogs, braying donkeys, or any other animal which 
chooses to disturb its neighbours. 

The whole town, like most others in Greece, even 
in the Arcadian highlands, is full of half-built and just- 
finished houses, showing a rapid increase of prosperity, 
or perhaps a return of the population from country 
life into the towns which have always been so con- 
genial to the race. But if the latter be the fact, there 
yet seems no slackening in the agriculture of the 

1 This journey I since made by rail, in this place a harmless in- 
novation. 



xi THE ALPHEUS 251 

country, which in the Morea is strikingly diligent 
and laborious, reaching up steep hill-sides, and creep- 
ing along precipices, winning from ungrateful nature 
every inch of niggard soil. 1 This is indeed the con- 
trast of northern and southern Greece. In Boeotia 
the rich plains of Thebes and Orchomenus are often 
lying fallow, while all the rugged mountains of 
Arcadia are yielding wine and oil. The Greeks will 
tell you that it is the result of the security established 
by their Government in those parts of Greece which 
are not accessible from the Turkish frontier. They 
assert that if their present frontier were not at Ther- 
mopylae but at Tempe, or even farther north, the 
rich plains of northern Greece . would not have lain 
idle through fear of the bandits, which every dis- 
turbance excites about the boundaries of ill-guarded 
kingdoms. 

The carriage-road from Pyrgos up to Olympia was 
just finished, and it is now possible to drive all the 
way from the sea, but we preferred the old method 
of travelling on horseback to the terrors of a newly 
constructed Greek thoroughfare. There is, more- 
over, in wandering on unpaved thoroughfares, along 
meadows, through groves and thickets, and across 
mountains, a charm which no dusty carriage-road can 
ever afford. We* soon came upon the banks of the 
Alpheus, which we followed as our main index, though 
at times we were high above it, and at times in the 
meadows at the water-side ; at times again mounting 
some wooded ridge which had barred the way of the 
stream, and forced it to take a wide circuit from our 
course, or again crossing the deep cuttings made by 
rivulets which come down from northern Elis to swell 
the river from mile to mile. 

Our path must have been almost the same as was 

1 Cf. the passage quoted from M. Georges Perrot above, pp. 155-7. 



252 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

followed by the crowds which came from the west to 
visit the Olympic games in classical days : they must 
have ascended along the windings of the river, and as 
they came upon each new amphitheatre of hills, and 
each new tributary stream, they may have felt the 
impatience which we felt that this was not the sacred 
Altis, and that this was not the famous confluence of 
the Kladeos. But the season in which they travelled 
— the beginning of July — can never have shown them 
the valley in its true beauty. Instead of a glaring dry 
bed of gravel and meadows parched with heat, we 
found the Alpheus a broad and rapid river, which we 
crossed on horseback with difficulty ; we found the 
meadows green with sprouting corn and bright with 
flowers, and all along the slopes the trees were burst- 
ing into bud and blossom, and filling the air with the 
rich scent of spring. Huge shrubs of arbutus and 
mastich closed around the paths, while over them the 
Judas-tree and the wild pear covered themselves with 
purple and with white, and on every bank great 
scarlet anemones opened their wistful eyes in the 
morning sun. 

When we came to the real Olympia the prospect 
was truly disenchanting. However interesting exca- 
vations may be, they are always exceedingly ugly. 
Instead of grass and flowers, and pure water, we found 
the classic spot defaced with great mounds of earth, and 
trodden bare. We found the Kladeos flowing a turbid 
drain into the larger river. We found hundreds of 
workmen, and wheelbarrows, and planks, and trenches, 
instead of solitude and the song of birds. Thus it 
was that we found the famous temple of Zeus. 1 

This temple was in some respects the most cele- 
brated in Greece, especially on account of the great 

1 All this work is now over, but still it remains the duty of the 
guardians to keep grass and shrubs from invading the discovered sites. 



xi HISTORY OF OLYMPIA 253 

image of Zeus, which Pheidias himself wrought for it 
in gold and ivory, and of which Pausanias has left us 
a very wonderful description (v. 11, sqq.). It was 
carried away to Constantinople, and of course its 
precious material precluded all chance of its surviving 
through centuries of ignorance and bigotry, if it had 
not been consumed in a fire. The temple itself, to 
judge from its appearance, was somewhat older than 
the days of Pheidias, for it is of that thickset and 
massive type which we only find in the earlier Doric 
temples, and which rather reminds us of Paestum than 
of Athenian remains. It was built by a local architect, 
Libon, and of a very coarse limestone from the neigh- 
bourhood, which was covered with stucco, and painted 
chiefly white, to judge from the fragments which 
remain. But it seems as if the E leans had done all 
they could to add splendour to the building, when- 
ever their funds permitted. The tiles of the roof 
were not of burnt clay, but of white marble, the 
well-known and beautiful invention of the Naxian 
Byzes. Moreover, rivals of Pheidias and a number of 
his fellow-workers or subordinates at Athens, as well 
as other artists, had been invited to Olympia, to adorn 
the temple, and to them we owe the pediments, prob- 
ably also the metopes, and many of the statues, with 
which all the sacred enclosure round the edifice was 
literally thronged. Subsequent generations added to 
this splendour : a gilded figure of Victory, with a 
gold shield, was set upon the apex of the gable ; 
gilded pitchers at the extremities ; gilded shields were 
fastened all along the architraves by Mummius, from 
the spoils of Corinth, and the great statue of Zeus 
within still remained, the wonder and the awe of the 
ancient world. 

But with the fall of paganism and the formal 
extinction of the Olympic games (394 a.d.) the 



254 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

glories of the temple fell into decay. The great 
statue in the shrine was carried away -, many of the 
votive bronzes and marbles which stood about the 
sacred grove were transported to Italy ; and at last a 
terrible earthquake, apparently in the fifth century, 
levelled the whole temple almost with the ground. 
The action of this extraordinary earthquake is still 
plainly to be traced in the now uncovered ruins. It 
upheaved the temple from the centre, throwing the 
pillars of all the four sides outwards, where most of 
them lie with their drums separated, but still complete 
in all parts, and only requiring mechanical power to 
set them up again. Some preliminary shakes had 
caused pieces of the pediment sculptures to fall out of 
their place, for they were found at the foot of the 
temple steps ; but the main shock threw the re- 
mainder to some distance, and I saw the work of 
Alkamenes being unearthed more than twenty-five 
yards from its proper site. 

In spite of this convulsion, the floor of the temple, 
with its marble work, and its still more beautiful 
mosaic, is still there, and it seemed doubtful to the 
Germans whether there is even a crack now to be 
found in it. About the ruins there gathered some 
little population, for many fragments were found built 
into walls of poor and late construction ; but this 
work of destruction was fortunately arrested by a 
sudden overflow of the Alpheus, caused by the burst- 
ing of one of the mountain lakes about Pheneus. 
The river then covered all the little plain of Olympia 
with a deep layer of fine sand and of mud. A thicket 
of arbutus and mastich sprang from this fertile soil, 
and so covered all traces of antiquity, that when 
Chandler visited the place 150 years ago, nothing but 
a part of the cella wall was over ground, and this was 
since removed by neighbouring builders. But the 



xi THE PEDIMENT SCULPTURES 255 

site being certain, it only required the enterprise of 
modern research to lay bare the old level so fortunately 
hidden by the interposition of nature. The traveller 
who now visits Olympia can see the whole plan and 
contour of the great temple, with all its prostrate 
pillars lying around it. He can stand on the very 
spot where once was placed the unrivalled image — the 
masterpiece of Pheidias's art. He can see the old 
mosaic in coloured pebbles, with its exquisite design, 
which later taste — probably Roman — thought well to 
cover with a marble pavement. But far above all, he 
can find in adjoining sheds 1 not only the remains of 
the famous Nike of Paeonius, which stood on a high 
pedestal close to the east front, but the greater part 
of the pediment sculptures, which will henceforth 
rank among the most important relics of Greek 
art. These noble compositions have been restored 
with tolerable completeness, and now stand next to 
the pediments of the Parthenon in conception and in 
general design. 

For even if the restoration were never accom- 
plished, there is enough in the fragments of the 
figures already recovered to show the genius of both 
sculptures, but particularly of Alkamenes, the author 
of the western pediment. This perfectly agrees with 
the note of Pausanias, who adds, in mentioning this 
very work, that Alkamenes was considered in his day 
an artist second only to Pheidias. 

It was objected to me by learned men on the spot, 
that the eastern pediment, being the proper front of 
the temple, must have been the more important, and 

1 A commodious stone museum has since been built, and the treasures 
have been transferred to it. But the great earthquake of 1885, so near 
Olympia, makes us tremble for the safety of any sculpture in a stone 
building under a solid roof. How terrible if the house were to fall on 
the Hermes ! 



256 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

that Paeonius, as we know from an inscription, boasts 
that he obtained the executing of it by competition, 
thus proving that he was, at least in this case, pre- 
ferred to his rivals. But the decided superiority of 
Alkamenes's design leads me to suppose that the 
boast of Paeonius only applies to the eastern pedi- 
ment, and that probably the western had been already 
assigned to Alkamenes. Nor do I agree with the 
view that the eastern pediment must have been 
artistically the more important. In several Greek 
temples — e.g. the Parthenon, the temple at Bassae, 
and in this — the great majority of visitors must have 
approached it from the rear, which should accord- 
ingly have been quite the prominent side for artistic 
decoration. Let me add that far more action was 
permitted in the groups on this side, while over the 
entrance the figures were staid and in repose, as if to 
harmonise with the awe and silence of the entering 
worshipper. In any case, the work of Alkamenes is 
superior to that which remains to us of Paeonius in the 
eastern pediment, and in his figure of winged Victory, 
which was, I think, greatly overpraised by the critics 
who saw it soon after its discovery. 1 

The composition of the groups in the pediments and 
friezes has been described by Pausanias (v. 10, §§ 6-10) 
in a passage of great interest, which has given rise to 
much controversy. The general impression of Drs. 
Hirschfeld and Weil, when I was at Olympia, was 
against the accuracy of Pausanias, whom they con- 
sidered to have blindly set down whatever the local 
cicerones told him. That of Dr. Purgold was in his 
favour. The traveller says, however, that the eastern 

1 This judgment of mine has since been confirmed by the authority 
of Overbeck. It is indeed very hard to estimate rightly a new dis- 
covery of this kind. I rated the work of Alkamenes, perhaps, too 
highly. 



xi PLAN OF THE PEDIMENTS 257 

pediment, in which, as already remarked, it was not 
usual to represent violent action, depicted the pre- 
paration of the chariot race between Pelops and 
CEnomaus. In the centre was Zeus, whose torso 
has been recovered, and at the narrow ends of the 
field were figures of the Alpheus and Kladeos, to the 
right and left of the spectator respectively. These 
figures are partly recovered — graceful young men 
lying forward on the ground, and raising their heads 
to witness the contest. 

It is worth pausing for a moment upon this disposi- 
tion, which was so usual as to be almost conventional 
in the pediments sculptured during the best epochs of 
Greek art. In the centre, where the field was very 
high, and admitted a colossal figure, it was usual to 
place the god whose providence guided the events 
around him, and this god was represented calm and 
without excitement. Then came the mythical event 
grouped on either side ; but at the ends, where the 
field narrowed to an angle, it was usual to represent 
the calmness or impassiveness of external nature. 
This was done in Greek sculpture not by trees and 
hills, but by the gods who symbolised them. So 
thoroughly was nature personified in Greek art, that 
its picturesqueness was altogether postponed to its 
living conscious sympathy with man, and thus to a 
Greek the proper representation of the rivers of 
Olympia was no landscape, but the graceful forms of 
the river gods — intelligent and human, yet impassive 
spectators, as nature is wont to be. The very same 
idea is carried out more characteristically in the pedi- 
ment of Alkamenes, where, in spite of the violent 
conflict of Centaurs and Lapithas, the central and 
extreme figures, as I shall presently notice, are perfectly 
unmoved witnesses of lawless violence. 

The arrangement of the rest of the eastern pediment 



258 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

was evidently quite symmetrical. On Zeus's right 
hand was CEnomaus, his wife Sterope, his charioteer 
Myrtilus sitting before the four horses, and two 
grooms \ on his left, Pelops, Hippodamia, and a like 
number of horses and attendants. A good many 
pieces of these figures have been found, sufficient to 
tempt several art-critics to make conjectural restora- 
tions of the pediment, one of which is now set up, I 
believe, in the museum at Berlin. 

The western pediment, of which more, and more 
striking, fragments are recovered, is more difficult to 
restore, because Pausanias is unfortunately not nearly 
so precise in describing it, and because, moreover, he 
is suspected of a serious blunder about the central 
figure. Contrary to the precedent just mentioned, 
he says that this central figure is Pirithous, whose 
wife is just being carried off" by the Centaurs, and who 
ought therefore to be in violent excitement. But 
there had been found, just before we arrived at 
Olympia, a colossal head, of the noblest conception, 
which seems certainly to belong to the pediment 
sculptures, and which must be the head of this central 
figure. It is perfectlv calm and divine in expression, 
and almost forces upon the spectator the conclusion to 
which all the best judges lean, that it must be an 
Apollo, and that this was the central figure, while 
Pirithous was more actively engaged. There was on 
each side of this figure a Centaur carrying off", the one 
a maiden (I suppose the bride) and the other a boy, 
and Kasneus and Theseus at each side, coming to the 
rescue. 

But on the other figures Pausanias is silent ; and 

there were certainlv two beautiful mountain or river 

j 

nymphs at the extremities — lying figures, with the 
peculiar head-dress of a thick bandage wrapped all 
round the hair — which are among the most perfect 



xi PAUSANIAS'S ACCOUNT 259 

of the figures recovered. It seems also certain that 
Pirithous must have been somewhere on the pediment; 
and this would suggest a figure to correspond to him 
at the other side, for these groups were always sym- 
metrical. In this case Pausanias has omitted four 
figures at least in his description, and seems besides to 
have mistaken the largest and most important of all. 
The Germans cite in proof of these strictures his 
passing remark on the metopes, representing the 
labours of Herakles, on one of which was (he says) 
Herakles about to relieve Atlas, whereas this slab, 
which has been found, really represents Herakles 
carrying the globe, and one of the Hesperidae assisting 
him, while Atlas is bringing him the apple. 

This criticism will seem to most ordinary people 
too minute, and I am rather disposed to think well of 
Pausanias as an intelligent traveller, though he made 
some mistakes. 

But since the above words were written, sufficient 
time has elapsed not only to bring the excavations to 
an end, but to study more carefully the recovered 
fragments, and offer a calmer judgment as to their 
merits. On the whole, the strong feeling of the best 
critics has been one of disappointment. The design 
of both pediments still seems to me masterly, especially 
that of Alkamenes, but there can be no doubt that the 
execution is far below that of the Parthenon marbles. 
There are some positive faults — inability to reproduce 
drapery (while the nude parts are very true to nature), 
and great want of care in other details. It must be 
urged in answer that the pediments were meant to be 
seen about forty feet from the ground, and that the 
painting of the figures must have brought out the 
features of the drapery neglected in the carving. 
However true this may be, we can answer at once 
that the workmen of Pheidias did not produce this 



260 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

kind of work. The first quality of the Attic school 
was that conscientiousness in detail which meets us in 
every great age of art. 

So serious have these difficulties appeared to some, 
that they have actually suspected Pausanias of being 
misled, and having falsely attributed the work of 
obscure local artists to Alkamenes, and perhaps also 
falsely to Paeonius. They say that nothing is more 
common with vulgar cicerones than to attribute to 
a great master any old work of uncertain origin. 
Others, who will not proceed to such extremes, hold 
that only the general design was made by the two 
sculptors, and its execution handed over to local artists. 
This may probably have been the case. But I am 
disposed to infer from the overpraised Niki^ which 
certainly is the work of Pasonius, that he was not an 
artist of the quality of the great Attic school. 1 The 
whole external work of the temple seems to represent 
a stage rather earlier and ruder than the school of 
Pheidias. This is eminently the case with the metopes, 
which can hardly be later in date than 460 B.C., or 
pre-Pheidian in time. 

Very different is the impression produced by the 
greatest and most priceless gem of all the treasures at 
Olympia — the Hermes of Praxiteles, which was actu- 
ally found on the very spot where it was seen and 
described by Pausanias, fallen among the ruins of the 
temple which originally protected it. This exquisite 
figure, smaller than life size, represents the god Hermes 
holding the infant Dionysus on one arm; and showing 
the child some object now lost. The right arm and 
the legs from below the knees are gone ; the right 
foot with its sandal, an exquisite piece of work with 

1 The student who desires to prosecute this difficult subject should 
study Overbeck's History of Greek Sculpture, or the works of Air. A. S. 
Murray, or Mr. Copeiand Perry, on the same subject. 



xi THE HERMES 261 

traces of gold and red, has been recovered. It is 
remarkable that the back of the statue is unfinished, 
and the child treated rather as a doll than a human 
infant ; the main figure, however, now widely known 
through copies, is the most perfect remnant of Greek 
art. The temple in which the statue was found, the 
venerable Heraeon, is the most interesting of all the 
Olympian buildings in its plan, and has solved for us 
many problems in Greek architecture. The acute 
researches of Dr. Dorpfeld have shown that the walls 
were not of stone, but of sun-dried bricks, and that 
the surrounding pillars had gradually replaced older 
wooden supports, one of which was still there when 
Pausanias saw the building. The successive stone 
pillars and their capitals were of the same order, Doric, 
but varied in measurements and profile according to 
the taste of the day. So this ancient building showed, 
like our English cathedrals, the work of successive 
centuries in its restoration. The roof and architrave 
were evidently of wood, for all trace of these members 
has vanished ; but we learn from remains of the old 
'treasuries' described by Pausanias that in very old 
times wood and mud bricks were faced with coloured 
terra-cotta, moulded to the required form, and that 
this ornament was still used after stone had replaced 
bricks and mud as the material of the walls and archi- 
trave. These curious details, and many others, have 
been the main result of the architectural inquiries 
made by the Germans into the archaic buildings at 
Olympia ; but it would be tedious to the reader were 
I to discuss technical details. He will find them all 
put with great clearness, and indeed with elegance, in 
Botticher's Olympia. The complete results of the 
excavations are to be found in the official work on the 
explorations issued by the German Government. 

Unfortunately there only remains one very realistic 



26i RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

head of a boxer from a large class of monuments at 
Olympia, that of the portrait statues of victors at the 
games, of which one was even attributed to Pheidias, 
and several to Alkamenes, in Pausanias's time. All 
these were votive statues, set up by victors at the 
games, or victors in war, and in the early times were 
not portraits strictly speaking, but ideal figures. Later 
on they became more realistic, and were made in the 
likeness of the offerer, a privilege said at one time 
only to have been accorded to those who had won 
thrice at Olympia. 

The commemoration of gymnastic victories by 
these statues seems to have completely supplanted the 
older fashion of triumphal odes, which in Pindar's day 
were so prized, and so dearly bought from lyric poets. 
When these odes first came to be composed, sculpture 
was still struggling with the difficulties of human 
expression, and there was no one who would not feel 
the great artistic superiority of Pindar's verse to the 
cold stiffness of the archaic reliefs of the same epoch, 
which attempt portraiture. The figure of Aristion 
by Aristokles, the similar relief by Anxenor the 
Naxian, and the relief of the discus-thrower, are 
sufficient examples of what sculptured portraits were 
in comparison with the rich music of Simonides and 
Pindar. But while lyric poetry passed into the higher 
service of tragedy, or degenerated into the extravagance 
of the later dithyramb, sculpture grew into such ex- 
quisite perfection, and was of its very nature so enduring 
and manifest, that the Olympic victor chose it as the 
surest avenue to immortal fame. And so it was up to 
Pausanias's day, when every traveller could study the 
records of the games at Olympia, or even admire the 
most perfect of the statues in the palaces of Roman 
Emperors, whither they had been transferred. 

But the day came when the poets were avenged 



xi SCULPTURE AT OLYMPIA 263 

upon the sculptors. Olympia sank under general 
decay and sudden catastrophe. Earthquakes and bar- 
barians ravaged its treasury, and while Pindar was 
being preserved in manuscript, until his resurrection 
in the days of printing, the invasion of the Kladeos 
saved the scanty remains in the Altls from destruction 
only by covering them with oblivion. Now, in the day 
of its resurrection, pedestal after pedestal with its votive 
inscription has been unearthed, but, except the Nike of 
Paeonius, no actual votive statue has been recovered. 

The river Alpheus, which has done such excellent 
work in its inundations, does not confine itself to 
concealing antiquities, but sometimes discovers them. 
Its rapid course eats away the alluvial bank which the 
waters have deposited ages ago, and thus encroaches 
upon old tombs, from which various relics are washed 
down in its turbid stream. The famous helmet dedi- 
cated by Hiero, son of Deinomenes, was discovered in 
the river in this way j and there is also in the Ministry 
of Public Instruction a large circular band of bronze, 
riveted together where the ends meet, with very 
archaic zigzag and linear patterns, which was found 
in the same way some twenty years ago, and which 
seems to me of great interest, as exhibiting a kind of 
workmanship akin to the decorations in the Schliemann 
treasure of Mycenae. There is also a rude red earthen 
pot in the Turkish house on the Acropolis at Athens, 
which is decorated with the same kind of lines. It 
is very important to point out these resemblances to 
travellers, for there is such endless detail in Greek 
antiquities, and so little has yet been classified, that 
every observation may be of use to future students, even 
though it may merely serve as a hint for closer research. 

The stadium and hippodrome, which lie farther 
away from the river, and right under the conical hill 
called Kronion, have not yet, I believe, been completely 



264 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

investigated ; but they may no doubt offer us some 
new and interesting evidences on the management of 
the famous Olympian games. 

These games were not at all what most people 
imagine them to be. I will therefore delay the reader 
with some details concerning this most interesting 
side of old Greek life. 

The establishment of games at Olympia was 
assigned by the poets to mythical ages, and not only 
is there a book of the Iliad devoted to funeral games, 
but in Pindar's eleventh Olympic Ode this particular 
establishment is made coeval with the labours of 
Herakles. Whether such evidence is indeed con- 
clusive may fairly be doubted. The twenty-third 
book of the 7/zW, which shows traces of being a later 
portion of the poem, describes contests widely differing 
from those at Olympia, and the mythical .founders 
enumerated by Pausanias (v. 7) are so various and 
inconsistent that we can see how obscure the question 
appeared to Greek archaeologists, even did we not 
find at the end of the enumeration the following 
significant hint: — c But after Oxylus — for Oxylus, 
too, established the contest — after his reign it fell out 
of use till the Olympiad of Iphitus ' (that is to say, till 
the first Ol., which is dated 776 B.C.), Oxylus being 
the companion of the Herakleidae, who obtained Elis 
for his portion. Pausanias adds that when Iphitus 
renewed the contest, men had forgotten the old 
arrangements, and only gradually came to remember 
them^ and whenever they recollected any special com- 
petition they added it to the games. This is the 
excellent man's theory to account for the gradual 
addition of long races, of wrestling, discus-throwing, 
boxing, and chariot-racing, to the original sprint race 
of about 200 yards, which was at first the only known 
competition. 



xi THE OLYMPIC GAMES 265 

The facts seem to me rather to point to the late 
growth of games in Greece, which may possibly have 
begun as a local feast at Olympia in the eighth cen- 
tury, but which only rose to importance during the 
reign of the despots throughout Greece, when the 
aristocrats were prevented from murdering one another, 
and compelled to adopt more peaceful pursuits. 1 It 
was in the end of the seventh and opening of the sixth 
centuries that the Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian 
games show by their successive establishment the 
rapid spread of the fashion, and a vast number of local 
contests diffused through every district in Greece the 
taste and the training for such competitions. 2 These 
games lasted all through classical Greek history — the 
Olympian even down to later times, for they were 
not abolished till nearly 1200 years (Ol. 294) had 
elapsed since their alleged foundation. But the day 
of their real greatness was gone long before. Cicero 
indignantly repudiates the report that he had gone 
to see such games, just as a pious earl, within our 
memory, repudiated the report that he had attended 
the prize-fight between Sayers and Heenan. The 

1 The fact that some of these public meetings are associated with the 
fall of tyrants does not, I think, disprove what is here advanced. 

8 I have not room here to give in full my reasons for rejecting the 
earlier part of the Olympic register, as being the manufacture of Hippias 
of Elis, later than 400 B.C. But the reader who is curious on the subject 
may either consult my article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1881, 
or the appendix to my Problems in Greek History (1892). He will there 
see that there is no direct evidence whatever for any early list, and 
that the antiquary Pausanias, in his hunt after ancient monuments at 
Olympia, could find nothing earlier than the so-called 33rd Olympiad. 
Plutarch, moreover, in the opening of his Life of Numa, tells us plainly 
that the list was the manufacture of Hippias, and based on no trustworthy 
evidence. To accept the list therefore, in the face of these objections, is 
to exhibit culpable credulity. Nevertheless it was not for some years 
after the publication of my views, that they were adopted generally by 
Greek historians. Busolt professed to have superseded my arguments, 
which he proceeded to repeat with hardly a variation, adding very little of 
his own. 



266 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

good generals of earlier centuries, such as Alexander 
the Great and Philopcemen, set their faces against 
athletics as training for soldiers. Nay, still earlier, 
the Spartans, though they could contend with suc- 
cess in the pentathlon^ when they chose, did not 
countenance the fiercer competitions, as engendering 
ill-feeling between rivals, and, what was worse, com- 
pelling a man to declare himself vanquished, and feel 
disgraced. The Athenians also, as soon as the sophists 
reformed education, began to rate intellectual wrestling 
higher than any bodily exercise. Thus the supremacy 
of Athens and Sparta over the other Greek cities in 
the fifth century marked, in my opinion, the real 
turning-point in the Greek estimate of athletics, and 
the fact that the great odes of Pindar sing the glories 
of no Spartan, and only twice, very briefly, those of 
Athenians, seems to indicate that even then men 
began to think of more serious rivalries and more 
exciting spectacles than the festive meetings at 
Olympia. In the very next generation the poets 
had drifted away from them, and Euripides despises 
rather than admires them. The historians take little 
notice of them. 

Two circumstances only tended strongly to keep 
them up. In the first place, musical competitions 
(which had always been a part of the Pythian) and 
poetical rivalries were added to the sports, which were 
also made the occasion of mercantile business, of social 
meetings, and not seldom of political agitation. The 
wise responses of the Delphic oracle were not a little 
indebted to the information gathered from all parts of 
the Hellenic world at the games, some important 
celebration of which, whether at Nemea, the Isthmus, 
or the greater meetings, occurred every year. 

Secondly, if the art of poetry soon devoted itself to 
the higher objects of tragedy, and created for itself the 



xi THE OLYMPIC GAMES 267 

conflict which it celebrated, the art of sculpture became 
so closely connected with athletics as to give them an 
aesthetic importance of the highest kind all through 
Greek history. The ancient habit of setting up ideal 
statues of victors, which were made special likenesses 
if the subject was specially distinguished, supplied 
the Greeks with a series of historical monuments 
and a series of physical types not elsewhere to be 
matched, and thus perhaps the most interesting part 
of Pausanias's invaluable guide-book to Greece is his 
collection of notes (lib. vi. 1-20) on various statues 
set up in this way at Olympia, of which he mentions 
about two hundred, though he only professes to make 
a selection, and though several of the finest had 
already been carried off by Roman emperors. 

These things kept alive the athletic meetings in 
Greece, and even preserved for them some celebrity. 
The sacred truce proclaimed during the national 
games was of inestimable convenience in times of 
long and bitter hostilities, and doubtless enabled 
friends to meet who had else been separated for life. 1 
But the Panathenaic festivals were better exponents of 
fourth-century taste in Greece. There music and 
the drama predominated. Professional displays became 
equally admired as a pastime and despised as a pro- 
fession ; and I have no doubt that the athlete who 
spent his life going about from one contest to another 
in search of gymnastic triumphs was held in like 
contempt by Brasidas and by Cleon, by Xenophon 
and by Agesilaus. 

In the days of Solon things had been very different. 
He appointed a reward of 500 drachmas, then a very 

1 So also under the early Roman Empire the exiles on the barren 
islands of the JEgcan seem to have been allowed this indulgence. Cf. 
the curious passage from Plutarch I have quoted and explained in my 
Silver Age of the Greek World. 



268 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

large sum, for victors at Olympia, ioo for those at the 
Isthmus, and for the others in proportion. Pindar 
sings as if, to the aristocrats of iEgina, or the tyrants 
of Sicily, no higher earthly prizes were attainable. 
But we must not transfer these evidences — the habit 
or the echo of the sixth century B.C. — to the days of 
political and educated Greece, when public opinion 
altered very considerably on the advantage and value 
of physical competition. This being once understood, 
I will proceed to a short analysis of the sports, and 
will attempt to criticise the methods adopted by the 
old Greeks to obtain the highest physical condition, 
the nature of the competitions they established, and 
the results which they appear to have attained. 

The Greeks of Europe seem always to have been 
aware that physical exercise was of the greatest import- 
ance for health, and consequently for mental vigour, 
and the earliest notices we have of education include 
careful bodily training. Apart from the games of 
children, which were much the same as ours, there 
was not only orchestic or rhythmical dancing in grace- 
ful figures, in which girls took part, and which 
corresponded to what are now vulgarly called callis- 
thenics^ but also gymnastics, in which boys were 
trained to those exercises which they afterwards 
practised as men. In addition to the palastras^ 
which were kept for the benefit of boys as a matter 
of private speculation in Athens, and probably in 
other towns, regular gymnasia were established by 
the civic authorities, and put under strict supervision, 
as state institutions, to prevent either idleness or 
immorality. 1 In these gymnasia, where young men 

1 The very stringent laws quoted by ^Eschines in Timarchum may 
possibly be spurious, since we know from other allusions that they were 
not enforced. But more probably they existed as a dead lette^ which 
could be revived if occasion required. 



xi OLYMPIA— THE GAMES 269 

came in the afternoon, stripped, oiled themselves, and 
then got a coat of dust or fine sand over the skin, 
running, wrestling, boxing, jumping, and throwing 
with the dart were commonly practised. 

This sort of physical training I conceive to have 
grown up with the growth of towns, and with the 
abandonment of hunting and marauding, owing to 
the increase of culture. Among the aristocrats of 
epical days, as well as among the Spartans, who lived 
a village life, surrounded by forest and mountain, I pre- 
sume field-sports must have been quite the leading 
amusement ; nor ought competitions in a gymnasium 
to be compared for one moment to this far better and 
more varied recreation. The contrast still subsists 
among us, and our fox-hunting, salmon-fishing, grouse- 
shooting country gentleman has the same inestimable 
advantage over the city athlete, whose special training 
for a particular event has a tendency to lower him 
into a professional. There is even a danger of some 
fine exercises, which seemed common ground for 
both, such as boating and cricket, being vulgarised 
by the invasion of this professional spirit, which 
implies such attention to the body as to exclude 
higher pursuits, and which rewards special victories 
by public applause rather than by the intrinsic pleasure 
of sport for its own sake. Thus the Spartans not only 
objected to boxing and the pankration, in which the 
defeated competitor might have to ask for mercy ; 
they even for general purposes preferred field-sports, 
for which they had ample opportunities, to any special 
competitions in the strength of particular muscles. 
But in such places as Athens and its neighbourhood, 
where close cultivation had caused all wild country 
and all game to disappear, it was necessary to supply 
the place of country sport by the training of the 
gymnasium. This sort of exercise naturally led to 



270 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

contests, so that for our purpose we need not separate 
gymnastic and agonistic^ but may use the details pre- 
served about the latter to tell us how the Greeks 
practised the former. 

There is no doubt that the pursuit of high muscular 
condition was early associated with that of health, and 
that hygiene and physical training were soon dis- 
covered to be closely allied. Thus Herodicus, a 
trainer, who was also an invalid, was said to have 
discovered from his own case the method of treating 
disease by careful diet and regimen, and to have thus 
contributed to the advancement of Greek medicine. 
Pausanias also mentions (vi. 3. 9) the case of a certain 
Hysmon, an Elean, who, when a boy, had rheumatism 
in his limbs, and on this account practised for the 
pentathlon, that he might become a healthy and sound 
man. His training made him not only sound, but a 
celebrated victor. 

It would be very interesting to know in detail 
what rules the Greeks prescribed for this purpose. 
Pausanias tells us (vi. 7. 9) that a certain Dromeus 
(a curiously apposite name), who won ten victories 
in long races at various games (about Ol. 74, 485 
B.C.), was the first who thought of eating meat in 
his training, for that up to that time the diet of 
athletics had been cheese from wicker baskets (4k tw 
raAapwv). 1 It must be remembered that meat diet 
was not common among the Greeks, who, like most 
southern people, lived rather upon fish, fruit, and 

1 The modern Greeks make their dry cheese for keeping, even now, 
in wicker baskets, and distinguish it from y\(apb% rvpos, which now 
means cream cheese, and which they carry to market in woollen bags. 
There was a special market for it in Athens in Aristophanes's day, but 
not in woollen bags $ for, as Mr. Pickering (of Shrewsbury School) 
pointed out to me, the cream cheese of Aristophanes's day was kept 
in wicker work. I gladly here acknowledge this correction of the note 
in my former edition. 



xi OLYMPIA— THE GAMES 271 

vegetables, so that the meat dinners of Bceotia were 
censured as heavy and rather disgusting. However, 
the discovery of Dromeus was adopted by Greek 
athletes ever after, and we hear of their compulsory 
meals of large quantities of meat, and their consequent 
sleepiness and sluggishness in ordinary life, in such a 
way as to make us believe that the Greeks had missed 
the real secret of training, and actually thought that 
the more strong nutriment a man could take, the 
stronger he would become. The quantity eaten by 
athletes is universally spoken of as far exceeding the 
quantity eaten by ordinary men, not to speak of its 
heavier quality. 

The suspicion that, in consequence, Greek athletic 
performances were not in speed greater than, if even 
equal to, our own is, however, hard to verify, as we 
are without any information as to the time in which 
their running feats were performed. They had no 
watches, or nice measures of short moments of time, 
and always ran races merely to see who would win, 
not to see in how short a time a given distance could 
be done. Nevertheless, as the course was over soft 
sand, and as the vases picture them rushing along in 
spread-eagle fashion, with their arms like the sails of a 
windmill — in order to aid the motion of their bodies, 
as the Germans explain (after Philostratus) — nay, as 
we even hear of their having started shouting, if we 
can believe such a thing, their time performances in 
running must have been decidedly poor. 1 

In the Olympic games the running, which had 
originally been the only competition, always came 
first. The distance was once up the course, and 

1 I should, however, call attention to an exceptional vase in the 
Museum on the Acropolis, probably of late date, in which a runner is 
represented with his elbows back and hands closed, and near his sides, in 
very good form. 



272 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

seems to have been about 200 yards. After the year 
720 B.C. (?) races of double the course, and long races 
of about 3000 yards were added ; x races in armour 
were a later addition, and came at the end of the 
sports. It is remarkable that among all these varieties 
hurdle races were unknown, though the long jump 
was assigned a special place, and thought very im- 
portant. We have several extraordinary anecdotes of 
endurance in running long journeys cited throughout 
Greek history, and even now the modern inhabitants 
are remarkable for this quality. I have seen a young 
man keep up with a horse ridden at a good pace across 
rough country for many miles, and have been told that 
the Greek postmen are quite wonderful for their speed 
and lasting. But this is compatible with very poor 
performances at prize meetings. 

There were short races for boys at Olympia of half 
the course. Eighteen years was beyond the limit of 
age for competing, as a story in Pausanias implies, and 
a boy who won at the age of twelve was thought 
wonderfully young. The same authority tells us of a 
man who won the sprint race at four successive meet- 
ings, thus keeping up his pace for sixteen years — a 
remarkable case. There seems to have been no second 
prize in any of the historical games, a natural conse- 
quence of the abolition of material rewards. 2 There 
was, naturally, a good deal of chance in the course of 

1 Pausanias is responsible for the date, which he probably copied from 
Hippias of Elis. It is noted as a special wonder that the same man 
should win the sprint and long races at Olympia, which shows that the 
latter must have been mainly a test of staying power. The Spartan 
Ladas died at the winning-post, and this endurance was thought rather 
a wonderful feat, but of course his death may have resulted from bad 
training, or from heart disease. 

2 ' Know ye not, ' says St. Paul, * that all run, and one receiveth the 
crown ? ' — a quite different condition of things from that of the Iliad, 
where every competitor, like the boys at a private school, comes off with 
a prize. 



xi OLYMPIA— THE GAMES 273 

the contest, and Pausanias evidently knew cases where 
the winner was not the best man. For example, the 
races were run in heats of four, and if there was an 
odd man over, the owner of the last lot drawn could 
sit down till the winners of the heats were declared, 
and then run against them without any previous 
fatigue. The limitation of each heat to four com- 
petitors arose, I fancy, from their not wearing colours 
(or even clothes), and so not being easily distinguish- 
able. They were accordingly walked into the arena 
through an underground passage in the raised side of 
the stadium, and the name and country of each pro- 
claimed in order by a herald. This practice is accu- 
rately copied in the present Olympic games held at 
Athens. 

The next event was the wrestling match, which is 
out of fashion at our prize meetings, though still a 
favourite sport in many country districts. There is 
a very ample terminology for the various tricks and 
devices in this contest, and they have been explained 
with much absurdity by scholiasts, both ancient and 
modern. It seems that it was not always enough to 
throw your adversary, 1 but that an important part of 
the sport was the getting uppermost on the ground ; 
and in no case was a man declared beaten till he was 
thrown three times, and was actually laid on his back. 
It is not worth while enumerating the various technical 
terms, but it may be observed that a good deal of what 
we should call foul play was tolerated. There was no 
kicking, such as there used to be in wrestling matches 
in Ireland, because there were no boots, but Pausanias 
mentions (vi. 4. 3) a man who did not know how to 
wrestle, but defeated his opponents by breaking their 

1 Possibly this special sort of wrestling has been confused with the 
pankration, from which it can have differed but little, if it indeed subsisted 
permanently as a distinct form of wrestling. 

X 



274 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

fingers. We shall return to this point when speaking 
of the pankration. 

When the wrestling was over there followed the 
throwing of the discus and the dart, and the long leap, 
but in what order is uncertain ; for I cannot accept 
as evidence the pentameter line of Simonides, which 
enumerates the games of the pentathlon, seeing that it 
would be impossible to vary them from the order he 
gives without great metrical difficulties. Our only 
safe guide is, I think, the alleged date of the origin of 
each kind of competition, as it was plainly the habit of 
the Greeks to place the new event next after those 
already established. The sole exception to this is in 
the establishing of contests for boys, which seem 
always to have come immediately before the corre- 
sponding competition for men. But we are only told 
that both wrestling and the contest of five events 
(pentathlon) dated from the 18th Ol. (710 B.C.), and 
are not informed in what order each was appointed. 1 

The discus-throwing was mainly to test distance, 
but the dart-throwing to strike a mark. The discus 
was either of stone or of metal, and was very heavy. I 
infer from the attitude of Myron's discobolus, as seen in 
extant copies, that it was hurled standing, without 
any preliminary run. This contest is to be com- 
pared with our hammer-throwing, or putting of weights. 
We are, however, without any accurate information 
either as to the average weight of the discus, or the 
average distance which a good man could throw it. 
There is, indeed, one ancient specimen extant, which 
was found at iEgina, and is now preserved among the 
bronze antiquities at Munich. It is about eight inches 

1 The single competitions in running and wrestling were distinct from 
those in the pentathlon, and rewarded by separate crowns. I quote the 
date as evidence for the traditional opinion as to their gradual introduc' 
tion, and for this purpose only. 



xi OLYMPIA— THE GAMES 275 

in diameter, and something under four pounds in 
weight. But there seem to have been three sizes of 
discus, according as they were intended for boys, for 
grown youths (ayeveiot), or for men, and it is not 
certain to which class this discus belongs. Philostratus 
mentions 100 cubits as a fine throw, but in such a way 
as to make it doubtful whether he is not talking at 
random, and in round numbers. Similarly, we have no 
details concerning the javelin contest. But I suspect 
that here, if anywhere, the Greeks could do what we 
cannot ; for even the savages of to-day, who use spears, 
can throw them with a force and accuracy which is to 
us quite surprising. It is reported by trustworthy 
travellers that a Kaffir who comes suddenly on game 
will put a spear right into an antelope at ten or twelve 
yards' distance by an underhand chuck, without taking 
time to raise his arm. This is beyond the ability of 
any English athlete, however trained. 

The question of the long jump is more interesting, 
as it still forms a part of our contests. It is unlikely 
that the old Greeks practised the running jump or the 
high jump, for we never hear of a preliminary start, or 
of any difficulty about c breaking trig,' as people now 
call it. Furthermore, an extant epigram on a cele- 
brated athlete, Phayllus of Kroton, asserts that he 
jumped clean over the prepared ground (which was 
broken with a spade) on to the hard ground beyond — 
a distance of forty-nine feet. We cannot, of course, 
though some German professors believe it, credit this 
feat, if it were any single long jump, yet we can find 
no trace of anything like a hop, step, and jump, so 
that it seems wonderful how such an absurdity should 
be gravely repeated in an epigram. But the exploit 
became proverbial, and to leap vn-tp ra o-Ka/^ara (beyond 
the digging) was a constantly repeated phrase. 

The length of Phayllus's leap is even more incredible 



fjb RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

if the competition was in a standing jump, and yet 
the figures of athletes on vases strongly favour this sup- 
position. They are represented not as running, but 
as standing and swinging the dumb-bells or aXrrjpes 
(jumpers), which were always used by the older Greeks, 
as assisting them materially in increasing their distance. 
I can imagine this being the case in a standing jump 
where a man rose with the forward swing of the 
weights, but in a running jump the carrying of the 
weights must surely impede rather than assist him. 
Irish peasants, who take off very heavy boots to jump, 
often carry one in each hand, and throw them back- 
ward violently as they rise from the ground ; but this 
principle is not admitted, so far as I know, by any 
scientific authority, as of the slightest assistance. 

We hear of no vaulting or jumping with a pole, so 
that in fact the leap seems an isolated contest, and of 
little interest except as determining one of the events 
of the pentathlon, in which a man must win three in 
order to be declared victor. This pentathlon, as com- 
prising gentlemanly exercise without much brutality, 
was especially patronised by the Spartans. It was 
attempted for boys, but immediately abandoned, the 
strain being thought excessive for their health. 

There remain the two severest and most objection- 
able sports — boxing and the pankration. The former 
came first (Ol. 23), the other test of strength not 
being admitted till Ol. 33 (650 B.C.). But one special 
occasion is mentioned when a champion, who was 
competing in both, persuaded the judges to change the 
order, that he might not have to contend against a 
specially famous antagonist when already wounded and 
bruised. For boxing was, even from Homeric times, 
a very dangerous and bloody amusement, in which 
the vanquished were always severely punished. The 
Greeks were not content with naked fists, but always 



xi OLYMPIA— THE GAMES 277 

used a special apparatus, called t/^avres, which consisted 
at first of a weight carried in the hand, and fastened 
by thongs of hide round the hand and wrist. But 
this ancient cestus came to be called the gentle kind 
'jjuetXlyai) when a later and more brutal invention 
introduced 'sharp thongs on the wrist,' and probably 
increased the weight of the instrument. The suc- 
cessful boxer in the Iliad (Epeius) confesses that he is a 
bad warrior, though he is the acknowledged champion 
in his own line ; evidently this sport was not highly 
esteemed in epic days. In historical times it seems to 
have been more favoured. There was no doubt a 
great deal of skill required for it, but I think the body 
of the evidence goes to prove that the Greeks did not 
box on sound principles, and that any prominent 
member of the P.R. with his naked fists would have 
easily settled any armed champion of Olympian fame. 
Here are my reasons : — 

The principle of increasing the weight of the fist as 
much as possible is only to be explained by the habit 
of dealing swinging or downward strokes, and is in- 
compatible with the true method of striking straight 
home quickly, and giving weight to the stroke by 
sending the whole body with it. In Vergil's descrip- 
tion a boxer is even described getting up on tip-toe 
to strike his adversary on the top of the head — a 
ridiculous manoeuvre, which must make his instant 
ruin certain, if his opponent knew the first elements of 
the art. That this downward stroke was used appears 
also from the anecdote in Pausanias, where a father 
seeing his son, who was ploughing, drive in the share 
which had fallen out with strokes of his fist, without a 
hammer, immediately entered him for the boys' boxing 
match at Olympia. The lad got roughly handled 
from want of skill, and seemed likely to lose, when the 
father called out : ' Boy ! give him the plough stroke ! ' 



278 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

and so encouraged him, that he forthwith knocked his 
adversary out of time. 

It is almost conclusive as to the swinging stroke 
that throughout antiquity a boxer was not known as a 
man with his nose broken, but as a man with his ears 
crushed. Vergil even speaks of their receiving blows 
on the back. Against all this there are only two 
pieces of evidence — one of them incredible — in favour 
of the straight home stroke. In the fight between 
Pollux and Amykos, described by Theocritus [Idyll 22), 
Pollux strikes his man on the left temple, koX eTrefjarecrev 
c5ju,<£), which may mean, ' and follows up the stroke from 
the shoulder.' But this is doubtful. The other is 
the story of Pausanias (viii. 40. 3), that when Kreugas 
and Damoxenos boxed till evening, and neither could 
hit the other, they at last agreed to receive stroke 
about, and after Kreugas had dealt Damoxenos one on 
the head, the latter told him to hold up his hand, 1 and 
then drove his fingers right into Kreugas, beneath the 
ribs, and pulled out his entrails. Kreugas of course 
died on the spot, but was crowned as victor, on the 
ground that Damoxenos had broken his agreement of 
striking one blow in turn, by striking him with five 
separate fingers ! This curious decision was only one 
of many in which a boxing competitor was disqualified 
for having fought with the intention of maiming his 
antagonist. 

Little need be added about the pankration, which 
combined boxing and wrestling, and permitted every 
sort of physical violence except biting. In this 
contest a mere fall did not end the affair, as might 
happen in wrestling j the conflict was continued on 

1 This is the moment chosen by Canova in his celebrated representa- 
tion of these boxers in the Vatican, a fact of which I was ignorant till 
it was pointed out to me, in correcting an error I had made about them, 
by Mr. M'D. Campbell, of Glasgow. 



xi OLYMPIA— THE GAMES 279 

the ground, and often ended in one of the combatants 
being actually choked, or having his fingers and toes 
broken. One man, Arrachion, at the last gasp, broke 
his adversary's toe, and made him give in, at the 
moment he was himself dying of strangulation. 
Such contests were not to the credit either of the 
humanity or of the good taste of the Greeks, and 
would not be tolerated even in the lowest of our 
prize rings. 

I will conclude this sketch by giving some 
account of the general management of the prize 
meetings. 

There was no want of excitement and of circum- 
stance about them. In the case of the four great 
meetings there was even a public truce proclaimed, 
and the competitors and visitors were guaranteed 
a safe journey to visit them and to return to their 
homes. The umpires at the Olympic games were 
chosen ten months before at Elis, and seem to have 
numbered one for each clan, varying through Greek 
history from two to twelve, but finally fixed at ten. 
They were called both here and at the other great 
games 'EAAavoSiKou, judges of the Hellenes, in recog- 
nition of their national character. Three super- 
intended the pentathlon, three the horse races, and the 
rest the other games. They had to reside together in 
a public building, and undergo strict training in all 
the details of their business, in which they were 
assisted by heralds, trumpeters, stewards, etc. Their 
office was considered of much dignity and importance. 

When the great day came, they sat in purple robes 
in the semicircular end of the racecourse — a piece of 
splendour which the modern Greeks imitate by 
dressing the judges of the new Olympic games in full 
evening dress and white kid gloves. The effect even 
flow with neatly clothed candidates is striking enough \ 



280 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

what must it have been when a row of judges in 
purple looked on solemnly at a pair of men dressed in 
oil and dust — i.e. in mud — wrestling or rolling upon 
the ground ? The crowd cheered and shouted as it 
now does. Pausanias mentions a number of cases 
where competitors were disqualified for unfairness, 
and in most of them the man's city took up the 
quarrel, which became quite a public matter ; but at 
the games the decision was final, nor do we hear of 
a case where it was afterwards reversed. 1 They were 
also obliged to exact beforehand from each candidate 
an oath that he was of pure Hellenic parentage, that 
he had not taken, or would not take, any unfair 
advantage, and that he had spent ten months in 
strict training. This last rule I do not believe. It 
is absurd in itself, and is contradicted by such 
anecdotes as that of the sturdy plough-boy quoted 
above, and still more directly by the remark of 
Philostratus [Gymn. 38), who ridicules any inquiry into 
the morals or training of an athlete by the judges, 
Its only meaning could have been to exclude random 
candidates, if the number was excessive, and in later 
times some such regulation may have subsisted, but I 
do not accept it for the good classical days. There 
is the case of a boy being rejected for looking too 
young and weak, and winning in the next Olympiad 
among the men. But in another instance the com- 
petitor disqualified (for unfairness) went mad with 
disappointment. Aristotle notes that it was the 
rarest possible occurrence for a boy champion to 

1 The first case of cheating was said to have taken place in the 98th 
Ol. (388 B.C.), when the Thessalian Eupolos was convicted of bribing 
the three boxers opposed to him, one of whom had won at the previous 
meeting. Such crimes were commemorated by bronze figures of Zeus 
(called Zdves at Elis), which were of the value of the fines inflicted, and 
had inscriptions warning all athletes of the dangers and the disgrace of 
cheating. 



xi OLYMPIA— THE GAMES 281 

turn out successful among the full-grown athletes, 
but Pausanias seems to contradict him, a fair number 
of cases being cited among the selection which he 
makes. 

There is yet one unpleasant feature to be noted, 
which has disappeared from our sports. Several 
allusions make it plain that the vanquished, even 
vanquished boys, were regarded as fit subjects for 
jibe and ridicule, and that they sneaked home by 
lanes and backways. When the most ideal account 
which we have of the games gives us this informa- 
tion, we cannot hesitate to accept it as probably a 
prominent feature, which is, moreover, thoroughly 
consistent with the character of the old Greeks as I 
conceive it. 1 

The general conclusion to which all these details 
lead us is this, that with all the care and with all the 
pomp expended on Greek athletic meetings, despite 
the exaggerated fame attained by victors, and the 
solid rewards both of money and of privileges accorded 
them by their grateful country, the results attained 
seem to have been inferior to those of English 
athletes. There was, moreover, an element of 
brutality in them, which is very shocking to modern 
notions : and not all the ideal splendour of Pindar's 
praises, or of Pythagoras's art, can raise the Greek 
pankratiast as an athlete above the level of a modern 
prize-fighter. But, nevertheless, by the aid of their 
monumental statues, their splendid lyric poetry, and 
the many literary and musical contests which were 
combined with gymnastic, the Greeks contrived, as 
usual, to raise very common things into a great 
national manifestation of culture which we cannot 
hope to equal. 

1 The reader will find some illustrations of it in my Social Greece^ 
7th edition, p. 96. 



282 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

For common they were, and very human, in the 
strictest sense. Dry-as-dust scholars would have us 
believe that the odes of Pindar give a complete 
picture of these games ; as if all the booths about 
the course had not been filled with idlers, pleasure- 
mongers, and the scum of Greek society ! Tumbling, 
thimble-rigging, and fortune-telling, along with love- 
making and trading, made Olympia a scene not 
unlike the Derby. When the drinking parties of 
young men began in the evening, there may even 
have been a soupfon of Donnybrook Fair about it, but 
that the committee of management were probably 
strict in their discipline. From the Isthmian games 
the successful athletes, with their training over, 
retired, as most athletes do, to the relaxation afforded 
by city amusements. One can imagine how amply 
Corinth provided for the outburst of liberty after 
the long and arduous subjection to physical training. 

But all these things are perhaps justly forgotten, 
and it is ungrateful to revive them from oblivion. 
The dust and dross of human conflict, the blood and 
the gall, the pain and the revenge — all this was laid 
aside like the athlete's dress, and could not hide the 
glory of his naked strength and his iron endurance. 
The idleness and vanity of human admiration have 
vanished with the motley crowd, and have left us 
free to study the deeper beauty of human vigour 
with the sculptor, and the spiritual secrets of its 
origin with the poet. Thus Greek gymnastic, with 
all its defects — perhaps even with its absurdities — has 
done what has never been even the dream of its 
modern sister : it stimulated the greatest artists and 
the highest intellects, and through them ennobled 
and purified public taste and public morals. 

When wc left Olympia, and began to ascend the 



xi MOUNT ERYMANTHUS 283 

course of the Alpheus, the valley narrowed to the 
broad bed of the stream. The way leads now along 
the shady slopes high over the river, now down in 
the sandy flats left bare in the summer season. There 
are curious zones of vegetation distinctly marked 
?long the course of the valley. On the river bank, 
And in the little islands formed by the stream, are 
laurels, myrtles, and great plane-trees. On the steep 
and rocky slopes are thick coverts of mastich, 
arbutus, dwarf-holly, and other evergreens which 
love to clasp the rocks with their roots ; and they are 
all knit together by great creeping plants, the wild 
vine, the convolvulus, and many that are new and 
nameless to the northern stranger. On the heights, 
rearing their great tops against the sky, are huge 
pine-trees, isolated and still tattered with the winter 
storms. • 

c Ces adieux a PElide,' adds M. Beul6, c laissent une 
pure et vive impression. Rarement la nature se trouve 
en si parfaite harmonie avec les souvenirs. On dirait 
un theatre £ternel, toujours pr£t pour les joies pacifiques, 
toujours pare pour les fetes, et qui, depuis dix-huit 
siecles, attend ses acteurs qui ont disparu.' 

Travellers going from Olympia northward either 
go round by train through Elis to Patras — a journey 
of some hours — or by Kalavryta to Megaspilion, and 
thence to Vostitza, thus avoiding the great Alps of 
Olonos (as Ery man thus is now called) and Chelmos, 
which are among the highest and most picturesque in 
Greece. After my last visit to Olympia (1884) I 
was so tantalised by the perpetual view of the snowy 
crest of Olonos, that I determined to attempt a new 
route, not known to any of the guide-books, 1 and 
cross over the mountain, as directly as I could, from 

1 It has been since inserted from my notes in the English translation 
of Baedeker's Greece. 



284 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Olympia to Patras. It was easy for me to carry out 
this plan, being accompanied by an ardent Greek 
antiquary, M. Castriotis, and by Dr. Purgold from 
Olympia, who had travelled through most of Greece, 
but was as anxious as I was to try this new route. 

So we started on a beautiful spring morning, up 
the valley of the Kladeos, with all the trees bursting 
into leaf and blossom, and the birds singing their 
hymns of delight. The way was wooded, and led 
up through narrow and steep, but not difficult glens, 
until, on a far higher level, we came in three or four 
hours to the village of Lala, once an important 
Turkish fort. Here was a higher plain, from which 
we began to see the plan of that vast complex of 
mountains which form the boundaries of the Old 
Elis, Achaia, and Arcadia, and which have so often 
been the scenes of difficult campaigns. From Lala, 
where we breakfasted, we crossed a sudden deep 
valley, and found ourselves, on regaining the higher 
level, in a vast oak forest, unlike anything I had yet 
seen in Greece. The trees had been undisturbed for 
centuries, and the forest is even avoided in summer by 
the natives, on account of the many poisonous snakes 
which hide in the deep layers of dead leaves. In 
that high country the oaks were just turning pink 
with their new buds, and not a green leaf was to be 
seen, so we could trust to the winter sleep of the 
snakes, while we turned aside again and again from 
our path, to the great perplexity of the muleteers, to 
dig up wood anemones of all colours, pale blue, pink, 
deep crimson, scarlet, snowy-white, which showed 
brilliantly on the brown oak-leaf carpet. 

We spent at least two hours in riding through 
this forest, and then we rose higher and higher, 
passing along the upper edge of deep glens, with 
rushing streams far beneath us. The most beautiful 



xi TRIPOTAMO 285 

point was one from which we looked down a vast 
straight chasm of some fifteen miles, almost as deep 
as a canon, with the silvery Erymanthus river pursuing 
its furious course so directly as to be clearly visible all 
the way. But ascending the river from this point, 
where its course comes suddenly round a corner, the 
upper country was no longer wooded but bleak, like 
most of the Alpine Arcadia, a country of dire winters 
and great hardship to the population, who till an 
unwilling soil on the steep slopes of giant precipices. 

We were much tempted to turn up another tor- 
tuous glen to the hidden nest of Divri, where the 
Greeks found refuge from Turkish persecution in the 
great war — a place so concealed, and so difficult of 
access, that an armed force has never penetrated there. 
But the uncertainties of our route were too many to 
admit of these episodes, so we hurried on to reach the 
Khan of Tripotamo in the evening — a resting-place 
which suggested to us strongly the inn where S. 
John is reported to have slept in the apocryphal Acts 
of his life. Being very tired with preaching and 
travelling, he found it so impossible to share the room 
with the bugs, that he besought them in touching 
language to allow him to sleep ; practically, in virtue 
of his apostolic authority, he ordered them out of the 
house. They all obeyed, but when in the morning 
the apostle and his companions found them waiting 
patiently outside the door, he was so moved by their 
consideration for him, that he permitted them to 
return and infest the house. 

Nor were the bugs perhaps the worst. Being 
wakened by a crunching noise in the night, I per- 
ceived that a party of cats had come in to finish our 
supper for us, and when startled by a flying boot, 
they made our beds and bodies the stepping-stones for 
a leap to the rafters, and out through a large hole in 



286 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

the roof. By and by I was aroused by the splashing 
of cold water on my face, and found that a heavy 
shower had come on, and was pouring through the 
cats' passage. So I put up my umbrella in bed till 
the shower was over — the only time I felt rain during 
the whole of that voyage. I notice that Miss Agnes 
Smith, who travelled through these parts in May also, 
and had very similar experiences at Tripotamo, was 
wet through almost every day. We did not see more 
than two showers, and were moreover so fortunate as 
to have perfectly calm days, whenever we were cross- 
ing high passes, though in general the breeze was so 
strong as to be almost stormy in the valleys. 

Next morning we followed the river up to the 
neighbouring site of Psophis, so picturesquely described 
by Polybius in his account of Philip V.'s campaigns 
in Elis and Triphylia. 1 This town, regarded as the 
frontier-town of Elis, Arcadia, and Achaia, would well 
repay an enterprising excavator. The description of 
Polybius can be verified without difficulty, and ruins 
are still visible. We found out from a solitary traveller 
that our way turned to the north, up one of the afflu- 
ents of the Erymanthus, and so we ascended in com- 
pany with this worthy man to a village (Lechouri) 
under the highest precipices of Olonos. He was full 
of the curiosity of a Greek peasant — Who were we, 
where did we come from, were we married, had we 
children, how many, what was our income, was it 
from land, was it paid by the State, could we be dis- 
missed by the Government, were we going to write 
about Greece, what would we say, etc. etc. ? Such 
was the conversation to which we submitted for the 
sake of his guidance. But at last it seemed as if our 
way was actually at an end, and we had come into an 
impassable cul-de-sac. Perpendicular walls of rock 

1 Polybius, iv. 70. 



xi OLONOS 287 

surrounded us on all sides except where we had entered 
by constantly fording the stream, or skirting along its 
edge. Was it possible that the curiosity of our fellow- 
traveller had betrayed him into leading us up this 
valley to the village whither he himself was bound ? 
We sought anxiously for the answer, when he showed 
us a narrow strip of dark pine-trees coming down 
from above, in form like a little torrent, and so reach- 
ing with a narrow thread of green to the head of the 
valley. This was our pass, the pine-trees with their 
roots and stems made a zigzag path up the almost 
perpendicular wall possible, and so we wended our 
way up with infinite turnings, walking or rather 
climbing for safety's sake, and to rest the labour- 
ing mules. Often as I had before attempted steep 
ascents with horses in Greece, I never saw anything so 
astonishing as this. 

When we had reached the top we found ourselves 
on a narrow saddle, with snowy heights close to us on 
both sides, the highest ridge of Olonos facing us a few 
miles away, and a great pine forest reaching down on 
the northern side, whither our descent was to lead us. 
About us were still great patches of snow, and in 
them were blowing the crocus and the cyclamen, with 
deep blue scilla. Far away to the south reached, in a 
great panorama, the mountains of Arcadia, and even 
beyond them the highest tops of Messene and Laconia 
were plainly visible. The air was clear, the day 
perfectly fine and calm. To the north the chain of 
Erymanthus still hid from us the far distance. For a 
long time, while our muleteers slept and the mules 
and ponies rested, we sat wondering at the great view. 
The barometer indicated that we were at a height of 
about 5500 feet. The freshness and purity of the 
atmosphere were such that no thought of hunger or 
fatigue could mar our perfect enjoyment. In the 



288 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap, xi 

evening, descending through gloomy pines and 
dazzling snow, we reached the village of Hagios 
Vlasos, where the song of countless nightingales be- 
guiled the hours of the night, for here too sleep was 
not easily obtained. 

The journey from this point to Patras, which we 
accomplished in twelve hours, is not so interesting, 
and the traveller who tries it now had better telegraph 
for a carriage to meet him as far as possible on the 
way. By this time a good road is finished for many 
miles, and the tedium and heat of the plain, as you 
approach Patras, are very trying. But with this help, 
I think no journey in all Greece so well worth at- 
tempting, and of course it can be accomplished in 
either direction. 

Patras is indeed an excellent place for a starting- 
point. Apart from the route just described, you can 
go by boat to Vostitza, and thence to Megaspilion. 
There are, moreover, splendid alpine ascents to be 
made for those who like such work, to the summits 
of Chelmos and Olonos (Ery man thus), and this is 
best done from Patras. Moreover, Patras is itself a 
most lovely place, commanding a noble view of the 
coast and mountains of ifEtolia across the narrow fiord, 
as well as of the Ionian islands to the N.W. Right 
opposite is the ever-interesting site of Missolonghi. 
Last, and perhaps not least, there are one or two hotels 
at Patras, where the traveller who has spent ten days 
of rough outing in Peloponnesus will find a haven of 
rest and comfort. 1 From here steamers will carry him 
to Athens round the coast, or home by Italy. 

1 Those who have the privilege of Mr. Wood's acquaintance will 
find at his place how charming a Greek house and garden can be made 
by civilised society. For three generations this delightful retreat has 
been inhabited by the family whose name seems permanently associated 
with the British Consulate at Patras. 



CHAPTER XII 

ARCADIA ANDRITZENA BASSJE MEGALOPOLIS 

TRIPOLITZA 

There is no name in Greece which raises in the 
mind of the ordinary reader more definite ideas than 
the name Arcadia. It has become indissolubly con- 
nected with the charms of pastoral ease and rural 
simplicity. The sound of the shepherd's pipe and the 
maiden's laughter, the rustling of shady trees, the 
murmuring of gentle fountains, the bleating of lambs 
and the lowing of oxen — these are the images of peace 
and plenty which the poets have imagined in that 
ideal retreat. There are none more unfounded in 
the real nature and aspect of the country, and more 
opposed to the sentiment of the ancients. Rugged 
mountains and gloomy defiles, a harsh and wintry 
climate, a poor and barren soil, tilled with infinite 
patience j a home that exiled its children to seek 
bread at the risk of their blood, a climate more op- 
posed to intelligence and to culture than even Boeotian 
fogs, a safe retreat for bears and wolves — this is the 
Arcadia of old Greek history. Politically it has no 
weight whatever till the days of Epaminondas, and the 
foundation of Megalopolis. Intellectually, its rise is 
even later, and it takes no national part in the great 
march of literature from Homer to Menander. 1 It 

1 This is not contradicted by the fact of there being isolated Arcadian 
poets, such as Echembrotus and Aristarchus, distinguished in foreign 
schools of art. 

289 u 



2 9 o RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

was only famed for the marketable valour of its hardy 
mountaineers, of whom the Tegeans had held their 
own even against the power of Sparta, and obtained an 
honourable place in her army. It was also noted for 
rude and primitive cults, of which later men praised 
the simplicity and homely piety — at times also, the 
stern gloominess, which did not shrink from the 
offering of human blood. 

I must remind the reader that rural beauty among 
the ancients, as well as among the Renaissance visions 
of an imaginary Arcadia as a rustic paradise, by no 
means included the wild picturesqueness which we 
admire in beetling cliffs and raging torrents. These 
were inhospitable and savage to the Greeks. It 
was the gentle slope, the rich pasture, the placid 
river framed in deep foliage — it was, in fact, land- 
scape-scenery like the valley of the Thames, or 
about the abbeys of Yorkshire, which satisfied 
their notion of perfect landscape ; and in this the 
men of the Renaissance were perfectly agreed with 
them. 

How, then, did the false notion of our Arcadia 
spring up in modern Europe ? How is it that even 
our daily papers assume this sense, and know it to be 
intelligible to the most vulgar public ? The history 
of the change from the historical to the poetical con- 
ception is very curious, and worth the trouble of 
explaining, especially as we find it assumed in many 
books, but accounted for in none. 

It appears that from the oldest days the worship of 
Pan had its home in Arcadia, particularly about Mount 
Maenalus, and that it was already ancient when it was 
brought to Athens at the time of the Persian Wars. 
The extant Hymn to Pan, among the Homeric 
Hymns, which may have been composed shortly after 
that date, is very remarkable for its idyllic and pictur- 



xii ARCADIA 291 

esque tone, and shows that with this worship of Pan 
were early associated those trains of nymphs and 
rustic gods, with their piping and dance, which in- 
spired Praxiteles's inimitable Faun. These images 
are even transferred by Euripides * to the Acropolis, 
where he describes the daughters of Aglauros dancing 
on the sward, while Pan is playing his pipe in the 
grotto underneath. Such facts seem to show a gentle 
and poetical element in the stern and gloomy moun- 
taineers, who lived, like the Swiss of our day, in a 
perpetual struggle with nature, and were all their 
lives harassed with toil, and saddened with thankless 
fatigue. This conclusion is sustained by the evidence 
of a far later witness, Polybius, who in his fourth 
book mentions the strictness with which the Arcadians 
insisted upon an education in music, as necessary to 
soften the harshness and wildness of their life. He 
even maintains that the savagery of one town 
(Kynaetha) was caused by a neglect of this salutary 
precaution. So it happens that, although Theocritus 
lays his pastoral scenes in the uplands of Sicily, and 
the later pastoral romances, such as the exquisite 
Daphnis and Chloe^ are particularly associated with the 
voluptuous Lesbos, Vergil, in several of his Eclogues^ 
makes allusion to the musical talent of Arcadian shep- 
herds, and in his tenth brings the unhappy Gallus into 
direct relation to Arcadia in connection with the 
worship of Pan on Maenalus. But this prominent 
feature in Vergil — borrowed, I suppose, from some 
Greek poet, though I know not from whom — bore no 
immediate fruit. His Roman imitators, Calpurnius 
and Nemesianus, make no mention of Arcadia, and if 
they had, their works were not unearthed till the year 
1534, when the poetical Arcadia had been already 
created. There seems no hint of the idea in early 

1 Ion, vv. 492 sqq. 



292 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Italian poetry ; x for according to the histories ot 
mediaeval literature, the pastoral romavice did not 
originate until the close of the fifteenth century, 
with the Portuguese Ribeyro, and he lays all the 
scenes of his idylls not in a foreign country, but in 
Portugal, his own home. Thus we reach the year 
1500 without any trace of a poetical Arcadia. But at 
that very time it was being created by the single work 
of a single man. The celebrated Jacopo Sannazaro, 
known by the title of Actius Sincerus in the affected 
society of literary Naples, exiled himself from that 
city in consequence of a deep and unrequited passion. 
He lay concealed for a long time, it is said, in the 
wilds of France, possibly in Egypt, but certainly not 
in Greece, and immortalised his grief in a pastoral 
medley of prose description and idyllic complaint called 
Arcadia* and suggested, I believe, by the Gallus of 
Vergil. Though the learned and classical author 
despised this work in comparison with his heroic poem 
on the Conception of the Virgin Mary, the public of 
the day thought differently. Appearing in 1502, the 
Arcadia of Sannazaro went through sixty editions 

1 The Eclogues of Petrarch are modelled upon those of Vergil to the 
exclusion of the most characteristic features borrowed by the latter from 
Theocritus. 

2 The following extract from the first prose piece of the book will 
show how absolutely imaginary is his Arcadia, with its impossible com- 
bination of various trees, and its absence of winter •. — 

* Giace nella sommita di Partenio, non umile monte della pastorale 
Arcadia, un dilettevole piano, di ampiezza non molto spazioso, pero- 
che il sito del luogo non consente, ma di minuta e verdissima erbetta 
si ripieno, che, se le lascive pecorelle con gli avidi morsi non vi pasce- 
resso, vi si potrebbe d* ogni tempo ritrovare verdura. Ove, se io non 
m' inganno, son forse dodici o quindici alberi di tanto strana ed ecces- 
siva bellezza, che chiunque le vedesse, giudicherebbe che la maestra 
natura vi si fosse con sommo diletto studiata in formarli. Li quali al- 
quanto distanti, ed in ordine non artificioso disposti, con la loro rarita la 
naturale bellezza del luogo oltra misura annobiliscono. Quivi senza 
nodo veruno si vede il dritissimo abete, nato a sostenere i pericoli del 



xii THE ALPHEUS— THE LADON 293 

during the century, and so this single book created 
that imaginary home of innocence and grace which 
has ever since been attached to the name. Its occur- 
rence henceforward is so frequent as to require no 
further illustration in this place. 

But let us turn from this poetical and imaginary 
country to the real land — from Arcadia to Arcadia, 
as it is called by the real inhabitants. As everybody 
knows, this Arcadia is the alpine centre of the Morea, 
bristling with mountain chains, which reach their 
highest points in the great bar of Erymanthus, to the 
N.W., in the lonely peak of c Cyllene hoar,' to the 
N.E., in the less conspicuous, but far more sacred 
Lykaeon, to the S.W., and finally, in the serrated 
Taygetus to the S.E. These four are the angles, as 
it were, of a quadrilateral enclosing Arcadia. Yet 
these are but the greatest among chains of great 
mountains, which seem to traverse the country in all 
directions, and are not easily distinguished, or separated 
into any connected system. 1 They are nevertheless 
interrupted, as we found, by two fine oval plains — 

mare j e con piu aperti rami la robusta quercia, e 1' alto frassino, e lo 
amenissimo platano vi si distendano, con le loro ombre non picciola 
parte del bello e copioso prato occupando ; ed evvi con piu breve fronda 
1' albero, di che Ercole coronare si solea, nel cui pedale le misere figliuo- 
le di Climene furono trasformate : ed in un de' lati si scerne il node- 
roso castagno, il fronzuto bosco, e con puntate foglie lo eccelso pino 
carico di durissimi frutti j nell' altro 1' ombroso faggio, la incorruttibile 
tiglia, il fragile tamarisco, insieme con la orientale palma, dolci ed ono- 
rato premio dei vincitori. Ma fra tutti nel mezzo, presso un chiaro fonte, 
sorge verso il cielo un dritto cipresso,' etc. etc. The work is, more- 
over, full of direct imitations of Vergil, not, I fancy, of Theocritus also, 
as the Italian commentators suppose, for that poet was not adequately 
printed till 1495, which must have been very near the date of the actual 
composition of the Arcadia. 

1 It is worth noting that the Arcadian vision in the Shepherd of 
Hennas, describing a scene of twelve mountains of varied and contrasted 
aspect, though intended for an allegorical purpose, is really faithful to 
nature, and suggests that the author knew something of the country he 
describes. 



294 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

both stretching north and south, both surrounded 
with a beautiful panorama of mountains, and both, of 
course, the seats of the old culture, such as it was, in 
Arcadia. That which is southerly and westerly, and 
from which the rivers still flow into the Alpheus and 
the western sea, 1 is guarded at its south end by 
Megalopolis. That which is more east, which is 
higher in level, and separated from the former by the 
bleak bar of Maenalus, is the plain of Mantinea and 
Tegea, now represented by the important town of 
Tripoli tza. These two parallel plains give some plan 
and system to the confusion of mountains which cover 
the ordinary maps of Arcadia. 

The passage from Elis into Arcadia is nowhere 
marked by any natural boundary. You ride up the 
valley of the Alpheus, crossing constantly the streams, 
great and small, which come flowing into it from 
the spurs of Erymanthus, from northern Arcadia, and 
the adjoining highlands of Elis. The stream called 
Erymanthus, which is the old boundary, though 
called a XafBpos iroTapos by Polybius, does not strike 
the traveller here as it does higher up its course, and 
the only other confluent water worth mentioning is 
the Ladon, which meets the Alpheus at some hours' 
ride above Olympia, but which counted of old as a 
river of Arcadia. This Ladon seems to have specially 
struck Pausanius with its beauty, as he returns to it 
several times ; and later observers, such as M. Beule, 
have corroborated him, saying that on the banks of 
this river you may indeed find the features of the 
poetical Arcadia — grassy slopes and great shady trees, 
without the defiles and precipices so common in the 
inner country. The Ladon and its valley in fact, 
though in Arcadia, partake of the character of the 

1 Pausanias places the source of the Alpheus higher up, and close to 
Tegea in the eastern plain. 



xii RIDE TO ANDRITZENA 295 

neighbouring Elis : it is the outer boundary of the 
real Alps. The Alpheus, on the contrary, which is 
a broad, peaceful stream when it passes into tamer 
country, comes through the wildest part of central 
Arcadia ; and if you follow its course upward, will 
lead you first past the ancient site of Heraea, a few 
miles above the Ladon, and then through rugged and 
savage mountains, till you at last ascend to the valley 
of Megalopolis, round which it winds in a great 
curve. We did not follow this route, nor did we 
ascend the valley of the Ladon, in spite of its reputed 
beauties. For we were bound for Andritzena, a ride 
of eleven hours from Olympia, which lay to the S.E., 
and within easy distance of the temple of Bassae. 
We therefore forded the Alpheus, just above the con- 
fluence of the Ladon, where the two rivers form a 
great delta of sand, and the stream is broad and com- 
paratively shallow. The banks were clothed with 
brushwood, and above it with a green forest, along 
the grassy margin of which scarlet anemones were 
scattered like our primroses among the stems of the 
trees, and varied with their brightness the mosses and 
hoary lichen. From this point onward we began to 
cross narrow defiles, and climb up steeps which 
seemed impossible to any horse or mule. We entered 
secluded mountain valleys, where the inhabitants 
appeared to live apart from all the world, and looked 
with wonder upon the sudden stranger. We rested 
beside tumbling rivers, rushing from great wooded 
mountain sides, which stood up beside us like walls 
of waving green. The snow had disappeared from 
these wild valleys but a few weeks, and yet even the 
later trees were already clothed with that yellow and 
russet brown which is not only the faded remnant, 
but also the forerunner, of the summer green. And 
down by the river's side, the grey fig-trees were 



296 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

putting forth great tufts at the end of every branch, 
while the pear-trees were showering their snowy 
blossoms upon the stream. But in one respect, all 
this lonely solitude showed a marked contrast to the 
wilds of northern Greece. Every inch of available 
ground was cultivated ; all the steep hillsides were 
terraced in ridges with infinite labour ; the ravages 
of the winter's torrent were being actively repaired. 
There was indeed in some sense a solitude. No 
idlers or wanderers were to be seen on the way. But 
the careful cultivation of the country showed that 
there was not only population, but a thrifty and 
careful population. All the villages seemed encum- 
bered with the remains of recent building ; for almost 
all the houses were new, or erected within very few 
years. The whole of this alpine district seemed happy 
and prosperous. This, say the Greeks, is the result 
of its remoteness from the Turkish frontier, its almost 
insular position — in fact, of its being under undis- 
turbed Hellenic rule. No bandit has been heard of 
in Arcadia since the year 1847. kife an< ^ property 
are, I should think, more secure than in any part of 
England. Morals are remarkably pure. If all Greece 
were occupied in this way by a contented and indus- 
trious peasantry, undisturbed by ambition from within 
or violence from without, the kingdom must soon 
become rich and prosperous. It was not uncommon 
to find in these valleys two or three secluded home- 
steads, miles from any village. This is the surest 
sign both of outward security and of inward thrift, 
when people cut themselves off from society for the 
sake of ample room and good return for their industry. 
Late in the evening we entered the steep streets of 
the irregular but considerable town of Andritzena. 

We experienced in this place some of the rudeness 
of Greek travel. As the party was too large to be 



xii ANDRITZENA 297 

accommodated in a private house, we sought the 
shelter of a ^voSox^ov^ as it is still called — an inn 
with no chairs, no beds, one tiny table, and about two 
spoons and forks. We were in fact lodged within 
four bare walls, with a balcony outside the room, and 
slept upon rugs laid on the floor. The people were 
very civil and honest — in this a great contrast to the 
inn at Tripolitza, of which I shall speak in due time 
— and were, moreover, considerably inconvenienced 
by our arriving during the Holy Week of the Greek 
Church, when there is hardly anything eaten. There 
was no meat, of course, in the town. Still worse, no 
form of milk, cheese, or curds, is allowed during this 
fast. The people live on black bread, olives, and 
hard-boiled eggs. They are wholly given up to their 
processions and services ; they are ready to think of 
nothing else. Thus we came not only to a place 
scantily supplied, but at the scantiest moment of the 
year. This is a fact of great importance to travellers 
in Greece, and one not mentioned, I think, in the 
guide-books. Without making careful provision 
beforehand by telegraph, no one should venture into 
the highlands of Greece during this very Holy Week, 
and it should be remembered that it does not coincide 
with the Passion or Holy Week of the Latin Church. 
It was just ten days later on this occasion ; so that, 
after having suffered some hardships from this cause 
in remote parts of Italy, we travelled into the same 
difficulty in Greece. But I must say that a Greek 
fast is a very different thing from the mild and 
humane fasting of the Roman Catholic Church. We 
should have been well-nigh starved, had I not 
appealed, as was my wont, to the physician, 6 Kvptos 
tar/oos, of the town, a very amiable and cultivated 
man, and really educated in the most philosophical 
views of modern medicine. He was well acquainted, 



298 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

for example, with the clinical practice of the Dublin 
school, as exemplified in the works of Graves and 
Stokes. It seemed to me, from a comparison of many 
instances, that in this matter of medicine, as indeed 
generally, the Greeks show remarkable intelligence 
and enterprise as compared with the nations around 
them. 1 They study in the great centres of European 
thought. They know the more important languages 
in which this science can be pursued. A traveller 
taken ill in the remote valleys of Arcadia would 
receive far safer and better treatment than would be 
his lot in most parts of Italy. 

The gentleman to whom I appealed in this case 
did all he could to save us from starvation. He pro- 
cured for us excellent fresh curds. He obtained us 
the promise of meat from the mountains. He came 
to visit us, and tell us what we required to know of 
the neighbourhood. Thus we were able to spend the 
earlier portion of the night in comparative comfort. 
But, as might have been expected, when the hour 
for sleep had arrived, our real difficulties began. I 
was protected by a bottle of spirits of camphor, with 
which my rugs and person were sufficiently scented 
to make me an object of aversion to my assailants. 
But the rest of the party were not so fortunate. It 
was, in fact, rather an agreeable diversion, when we 
were roused, or rather, perhaps, distracted, shortly 
after midnight, by piercing yells from a number of 
children, who seemed to be slowly approaching our 
street. 

On looking out we saw a very curious scene. All 
the little children were coming in slow procession, 
each with a candle in its hand, and shouting Kyrie 

1 Having need of a throat specialist at Athens in 1905, I at once 
found one, not only excellent in his treatment, but a learned author in his 
•ubject. I could not have been better cured in London. 



kii ANDRITZENA 299 

Eleison at the top of its voice. After the children 
came the women and the older men (I fancy many of 
the younger men were absent), also with candles, and 
in the midst a sort of small bier, with an image of the 
dead Christ laid out upon it, decked with tinsel and 
flowers, and surrounded with lights. Along with it 
came priests in their robes, singing in gruff bass some 
sort of Litany. The whole procession adjourned to 
the church of the town, where the women went to a 
separate gallery, the men gathered in the body of the 
building, and a guard of soldiers with fixed bayonets 
stood around the bier of their Christ. 1 Though the 
congregation seemed very devout, and many of them 
in tears at the sufferings of their Saviour, they never- 
theless all turned round to look at us strangers who 
chanced to witness their devotions. To those who 
come from without, and from a different cult, and 
see the service of a strange nation in a strange tongue, 
the mesquin externals are the obtrusive feature, and 
we wonder how deep devotion and true piety can 
exist along with what is apparently mean and even 
grotesque. And yet in these poor and shabby ser- 
vices, with this neglect and insouciance of detail, 
there may be purer faith and better morals than in 
the gorgeous pageants and stately ceremonies of 
metropolitan cathedrals. 

We rose in the morning eager to start on our 
three hours' ride to Bassae, where Ictinus had built 
his famous but inaccessible temple to Apollo the 
Helper. The temple is very usually called the temple 
of Phigalia, and its friezes are called Phigalian, I 
think, in the British Museum. This is so far true, 
that it was built for and managed by the people of 
Phigalia. But that town was a considerable distance 

1 There is a delightful account of an Easter ceremony in Mr. Horton's 

fascinating study called In Argolit. 



300 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

off — according to Pausanias forty stadia, or about 
five miles ; and he tells us they built the temple at 
a place called Bassae (the glades), near the summit of 
Mount Kotilion. Accordingly, it ought to be con- 
sistently called the temple at or of Bassae. 

The morning, as is not unusual in these Alps, was 
lowering and gloomy, and as we and our patient 
mules climbed up a steep ascent out of the town, the 
rain began to fall in great threatening drops. But 
we would not be daunted. The way led among 
gaunt and naked mountain sides, and often up the 
bed of winter torrents. The lateness of the spring, 
for the snow was now hardly gone, added to the 
gloom : the summer shrubs and the summer grass 
were not yet green, and the country retained most 
of its wintry bleakness. Now and then there met 
us in the solitude a shepherd coming from the moun- 
tains, covered in his white woollen cowl, and with a 
lamb of the same soft dull colour upon his shoulders. 
It was the day of preparation for the Easter feast, and 
the lamb was being brought by this picturesque 
shepherd, not to the fold but to the slaughter. Yet 
there was a strange and fascinating suggestion in the 
serious face peering from its symphony of white, in 
the wilderness around, in the helpless patience of the 
animal, all framed in a background of grey mist, and 
dripping with abundant rain. As we wound our way 
through the mountains we came to glens of richer 
colour and friendlier aspect. The sound of merry 
boys and baying dogs reached up to us from below as 
we skirted far up along the steep sides, still seeking 
a higher and higher level. Here the primrose and 
violet took the place of the scarlet and the purple 
anemone, and cheered us with the sight of northern 
flowers, and with the fairest produce of a northern 
spring. 



xii THE RIDE TO BASSJE 301 

At last we attained a weird country, in which the 
ground was bare, save where some sheltered and 
sunny spot showed bunches of very tall violets, hang- 
ing over in tufts, rare purple anemones, and here and 
there a great full iris ; yet these patches were so ex- 
ceptional as to make a strong contrast with the brown 
soil. But the main feature were single oak-trees with 
pollarded tops and gnarled branches, which stood 
about all over these lofty slopes, and gave them a 
melancholy and dilapidated aspect. They showed 
no mark of spring, no shoot or budding leaf, but the 
russet-brown rags of last year's clothing hung here 
and there upon the branches. These wintry signs, 
the gloomy mist, and the insistent rain gave us the 
feeling of chill October. And yet the weird oaks, 
with their branches tortured as it were by storm and 
frost — these crippled limbs, which looked as if the 
pains of age and disease had laid hold of the sad 
tenants of this alpine desert — were covered with their 
own peculiar loveliness. All the stems were clothed 
with delicate silver-grey lichen, save where great 
patches of velvety pale green moss spread a warm 
mantle about them. This beautiful contrast of grey 
and yellow-green may be seen upon many of our own 
oak-trees in the winter, and make these the most 
richly coloured of all the leafless stems in our frosty 
landscape. But here there were added among the 
branches huge tufts of mistletoe, brighter and yellower 
than the moss, yet of the same grassy hue, though of 
different texture. And there were trees so clothed 
with this foreign splendour that they looked like 
some quaint species of great evergreen. It seemed 
as if the summer's foliage must have really impaired 
the character and the beauty of this curious forest. 

At last we crossed a long flat summit, and began 
to descend, when we presently came upon the temple 



302 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

from the north, facing us on a lower part of the lofty 
ridge. As we approached, the mist began to clear 
away, and the sun shone out upon the scene, while 
the clouds rolled back towards the east, and gradually 
disclosed to us the splendid prospect which the sanc- 
tuary commands. All the southern Peloponnesus lay 
before us. We could see the western sea, and the 
gulf of Koron to the south -, but the long ridge of 
Taygetus and the mountains of Malea hid from us 
the eastern seas. The rich slopes of Messene, and 
the rugged highlands of northern Laconia and of 
Arcadia, filled up the nearer view. There still 
remained here and there a cloud which made a blot 
in the picture, and marred the completeness of the 
landscape. 

Nothing can be stranger than the remains of a 
beautiful temple in this alpine solitude. Greek life is 
a sort of protest for cities and plains and human cul- 
ture, against picturesque Alps and romantic scenery. 
Yet here we have a building of the purest age and 
type set up far from the cities and haunts of men, and 
in the midst of such a scene as might be chosen by 
the most sentimental modern. It was dedicated to 
Apollo the Helper, for his deliverance of the country 
from the same plague which devastated Athens at the 
opening of the Peloponnesian War, 1 and was built by 
the greatest architect of the day, Ictinus, the builder 
of the Parthenon. 

It was reputed in Pausanias's day the most beauti- 
ful temple in Peloponnesus, next to that of Athene 
Alea at Tegea. Even its roof was of marble tiles, 
and the cutting of the limestone soffits of the ceiling 
is still so sharp and clear, that specimens have been 
brought to Athens, as the most perfect of the kind. 

1 This is what Pausanias says, though modern scholars seem very 
doubtful about it. 



xii BASSiE 303 

The friezes discovered in 18 12, quite close to 
the surface, by Mr. Cockerell and his friends, 
were carried away, and are now one of the greatest 
ornaments of the British Museum. Any one who 
desires to know every detail of the building, and 
see its general effect when restored, must consult 
Cockerell's elaborate work on this and the temple of 
iEgina. It affords many problems to the architect. 
Each of the pillars within the cella was engaged or 
attached to the wall, by joinings at right angles with 
it, the first pair only reaching forward, so to speak, 
towards the spectator as he entered. The temple 
faces north, contrary to the usual habit of the Greeks. 
In the very centre was found a Corinthian capital — 
another anomaly in a Doric temple, and at the epoch 
of Periclean art. In Mr. Cockerell's restoration of 
the interior, this capital is fitted to a solitary pillar in 
the centre of the cella, and close to the statue of the 
god, which apparently faced sideways, and looked 
towards the rising sun. It is a more popular theory 
that it was set up much later, with some votive tripod 
upon it, and that it does not belong to the original 
structure. The frieze in this temple was not along 
the outside wall of the cella, but inside, and over the 
pillars, as the narrow side aisle (if I may so call it) 
between the pillars and the cella wall was broken by 
the joining of the former, five at each side, with the 
latter. I cannot but fancy that this transference of 
the friezes to the inner side of the wall was caused by 
the feeling that the Parthenon friezes, upon which 
such great labour and such exquisite taste had been 
lavished, were after all very badly seen, being c skied ' 
into a place not worthy of them. Any one who will 
look up at the remaining band on the west front of 
the Parthenon from the foot of the pillars beneath 
will, I think, agree with me. At Bassae there are 



304 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

many peculiarities in the Ionic capitals, and in the 
ornamentation of this second monument of Ictinus's 
genius, which have occupied the architects, but on 
which I will not here insist. 1 The general effect is 
one of smallness, as compared with the Parthenon ; of 
lightness and grace, as compared with the temple at 
Olympia, the Doric pillars being here somewhat more 
slender than those of the Parthenon, though the other 
proportions are not unlike. The style of the frieze 
has been commented upon in all our histories of 
Greek art. The effect produced is, moreover, that 
of lateness, as compared with the Athenian sculp- 
tures j there is more exaggerated action, flying 
drapery and contorted limbs, and altogether a con- 
scious striving at a strong effect. But the execution, 
which was probably entrusted to native artists under 
Attic direction, is inferior to good Attic work, and 
in some cases positively faulty. Unfortunately, this 
part of the temple is in London, not at Bassas. 

The ruin, as we saw it, was very striking, and 
unlike any other we had visited in Greece. It is 
built of the limestone which crops up all over the 
mountain plateau on which it stands ; and, as the 
sun shone upon it after recent rain, was of a delicate 
bluish-grey colour, so like the surface of the ground 
in tone that it almost seemed to have grown out of 

1 Several details, such as the unusual length in proportion to the 
breadth, the engaged pillars inside the cella, and the forms of the 
capitals, have now been explained as deliberate archaicisms on the part 
of Ictinus, who here copied far older forms. The curious Ionic, and 
even the Corinthian, capitals may point back to old Asianic, or Assyrian, 
models, and the proportions of the cella with its engaged pillars have 
their prototype or parallel in the curious old Heraon (cf. p. 261) found 
at Olympia. This seems to me a very happy solution of the difficulties, 
and shows us Ictinus in a new light. Another specimen of his art, with 
unexpected features, may be the newly unearthed Hall of the Mysteries 
at Eleusis, already described, if indeed this be his work, and not a late 
copy of it* 



xii BASSjE 305 

the rock, as its natural product. The pillars are 
indeed by no means monoliths, but set together of 
short drums, of which the inner row are but the 
rounded ends of long blocks which reach back to the 
cella walls. But as the grain of the stone runs across 
the pillars they have become curiously wrinkled with 
age, so that the artificial joinings are lost among the 
wavy transverse lines, which make us imagine the 
pillars sunk with years and fatigue, and weary of 
standing in this wild and gloomy solitude. There is 
a great oak-tree, such as I have already described, 
close beside the temple, and the colouring of its stem 
forms a curious contrast to the no less beautiful 
shading of the time-worn pillars. Their ground 
being a pale bluish-grey, the lichens which invade 
the stone have varied the fluted surface with silver, 
with bright orange, and still more with a delicate 
rose madder. Even under a mid-day sun these rich 
colours were very wonderful, but what must they be 
at sunset ? 

There is something touching in the unconscious 
efforts of Nature to fill up the breaks and heal the 
rents which time and desolation have made in human 
work. If a gap occurs in the serried ranks of city 
buildings by sudden accident, the site is forthwith 
concealed with hideous boarding ; upon which, pre- 
sently, staring portraits of latest clown or merriest 
mountebank mock as it were the ruin within, and 
advertise their idle mirth — an uglier fringe around the 
ugly stains of fire or the heaps of formless masonry. 
How different is the hand of Nature ! Whether in 
northern abbey or in southern fane, no sooner are 
the monuments of human patience and human pride 
abandoned and forgotten, than Nature takes them into 
her gentle care, covers them with ivy, with lichen, 
and with moss, plants her shrubs about them, and 

X 



306 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

sows them with countless flowers. And thus, when 
a later age repents the ingratitude of its forerunners, 
and turns with new piety to atone for generations of 
forgetfulness, Nature's mantle has concealed from 
harm much that had else been destroyed, and covered 
the remainder with such beauty, that we can hardly 
conceive these triumphs of human art more lovely in 
their old perfection than in their modern solitude and 
decay. 

The way from Andritzena to Megalopolis leads 
down from the rugged frontiers of Arcadia and 
Messene, till we reach the fine rolling plain which 
has Karytena at its northern, and Megalopolis near 
its southern, extremity. Our guides were in high 
spirits, and kept singing in turn a quaint love song, 
which, after the usual timeless flourishes and shakes 
at the opening, ended in the following phrase, which 
their constant repetition stamped upon my memory: — 



i 



^EElfe^^ ^M r r-r 



^ 



The way was at first steep and difficult — we were 
still in the land of the violet and primrose. But after 
an hour's ride we came into a forest which already 
showed summer signs ; and here we found again the 
anemone, the purple and white cistus, among shrubs 
of mastich and arbutus. Here, too, we found the 
cyclamen, which is such a favourite in the green- 
houses and gardens of England. We passed a few 
miles to the south of Karytena, with the wonderful, 
and apparently impregnable fortress of Hugo de 
Bruyeres perched like an eagle's nest on the top of 
a huge cliff, from which there must be a splendid 
outlook not only down the valley of Megalopolis, but 
into the northern passes from Achaia, and the moun- 



xii MEGALOPOLIS 307 

tains of Elis. I can conceive no military post more 
important to the Arcadian plain, and yet it seems to 
have attained no celebrity in ancient history. From 
this fortress to the southern end of the plain, where 
the passes lead to Sparta and to northern Messene, 
there lies extended a very rich vein of country about 
twenty-five miles long, and ten or twelve broad, with 
some undulation, but practically a plain, well irrigated 
with rapid rivers, and waving with deep grass and 
green wheat. There are flourishing villages scattered 
along the slopes of the mountains, and all the district 
seems thoroughly tilled, except the region south of the 
town, where forests of olives give a wilder tone to the 
landscape. 

I confess I had not understood the history of the 
celebrated foundation of Megalopolis, until I came to 
study the features of this plain. Here, as elsewhere, 
personal acquaintance with the geography of the 
country is the necessary condition of a living know- 
ledge of its history. As is well known, immediately 
after the battle of Leuctra the Arcadians proceeded to 
build this metropolis, as a safeguard or makeweight 
against the neighbouring power of Sparta. Pausanias, 
who is very full and instructive on the founding of 
the city, tells us that the founders came from the chief 
towns of Arcadia — Tegea, Mantinea, Kleitor, and 
Maenalus. But these cities had no intention of merg- 
ing themselves in the new capital. In fact Mantinea 
and Tegea were in themselves fully as important a 
check on Sparta in their own valley, and were abso- 
lutely necessary to hold the passes northward to Argos, 
which lay in that direction. But the nation insisted 
upon all the village populations in and around the 
western plain (which hitherto had possessed no leading 
city) amalgamating into Megalopolis, and deserting 
their ancient homes. Many obeyed ; Pausanias 



308 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

enumerates about forty of them. Those who refused 
were exiled, or even massacred by the enraged majority. 
Thus there arose suddenly the great city^ the latest 
foundation of a city in Classical Greece. But in 
his account it seems to me that Pausanias has omitted 
to take sufficient note of the leading spirit ,of all the 
movement — the Theban Epaminondas. No doubt 
the traveller's Arcadian informants were too thoroughly 
blinded by national vanity to give the real account, if 
indeed they knew it themselves. They represented it 
as the spontaneous movement of the nation, and even 
stated it to have been done in imitation of Argos, 
which in older times, when in almost daily danger of 
Spartan war, had abolished all the townships through 
Argolis, and thus increased its power and consolidated 
its population. 

But the advice and support of Epaminondas, which 
made him the real founder, point to another model. 
The traveller who comes, after he has seen northern 
Greece, into the plain of Megalopolis, is at once struck 
with its extraordinary likeness to that of Thebes. 
There is the same circuit of mountains, the same 
undulation in the plain, the same abundance of water, 
the same attractive sites on the slopes for the settle- 
ments of men. It was not then Argos, with its far 
remote and not very successful centralisation, but 
Thebes, which was the real model j and the idea was 
brought out into actuality not by Arcadian but by 
Theban statesmanship. Any Theban who had visited 
the plain could not but have this policy suggested to 
him by the memory of his own home. But here 
Epaminondas seems to have concealed his influence, 
and carried out his policy through Arcadian agents, 
merely sending iooo Thebans, under Pammenes, to 
secure his allies against hostile disturbances, whereas 
he proceeded to the foundation of Messene in person, 



xii MEGALOPOLIS 309 

and with great circumstance, as the dreams and oracles, 
the discussions about the site, and the pomp at the 
ceremony amply show, even in the cold narrative of 
Pausanias. Megalopolis, though a great and brilliant 
experiment, was not a lasting success. It was laid out 
on too large a scale, and in after years became rather 
a great wilderness than a great city. 1 It was full of 
splendid buildings — the theatre, even now, is one of 
the most gigantic in Greece. But the violences of its 
foundation, which tore from their homes and household 
gods many citizens of ancient and hallowed sites, were 
never forgotten. It was long a leading city in politics, 
but never became a favourite residence, and fell early 
into decay. c Although,' says Pausanias (viii. 33), ' the 
great city was founded with all zeal by the Arcadians, 
and with the brightest expectations on the part of the 
Greeks, I am not astonished that it has lost all its 
elegance and ancient splendour, and most of it is now 
ruined, for I know that Providence is pleased to work 
perpetual change, and that all things alike, both strong 
and weak, whether coming into life or passing into 
nothingness, are changed by a Fortune which controls 
them with an iron necessity. Thus Mycenae, Nineveh, 
and the Boeotian Thebes are for the most part com- 
pletely deserted and destroyed, but the name of Thebes 
has descended to the mere acropolis and very few in- 
habitants. Others, formerly of extraordinary wealth, 
the Egyptian Thebes and the Minyan Orchomenus 
and Delos, the common mart of the Greeks, are some 
of them inferior in wealth to that of a private man of 
not the richest class ; while Delos, being deprived of 
the charge of the Oracle by the Athenians who settled 

1 The same must have been the case with Messene, which was laid 
out likewise on an absurdly large scale, as the remains of the great walls 
still show. They seem intended to enclose a whole parish, and not a 
city. But of these I shall speak again, p. 371. 



3 io RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

there, is, as regards Delians, depopulated. At Babylon 
the temple of Belus remains, but of this Babylon, once 
the greatest city under the sun, there is nothing left 
but the wall, as there is of Tiryns in Argolis. These 
the Deity has reduced to naught. But the city of 
Alexander in Egypt, and of Seleucus on the Orontes, 
built the other day, have risen to such greatness and 
prosperity, because Fortune favours them. . . . Thus 
the affairs of men have their seasons, and are by no 
means permanent.' These words of Pausanias have 
but increased in force with the lapse of centuries. 
The whole ancient capital of the Arcadians has well- 
nigh disappeared. The theatre, cut out from the deep 
earthen river bank, and faced along the wings with 
massive masonry, is still visible, though overgrown 
with shrubs ; and the English school of Athens has 
the credit of accomplishing its exploration. 1 

The ancient town lay on both sides of the river 
Helisson, which is a broad and silvery stream, but not 
difficult to ford, as we saw it in spring, and Pausanias 
mentions important public buildings on both banks. 
Now there seems nothing but a mound, called the 
tomb of Philopoemen, on the north side, with a few 
scanty foundations. On the south side the stylobate 
of at least one temple is still almost on the level of the 
soil, and myriads of fragments of baked clay tell us 
that this material was largely used in the walls of a 
city where a rich alluvial soil afforded a very scanty 
supply of stone — a difficulty rare in Greece. The 
modern town lies a mile to the south of the river, and 
quite clear of the old site, so that excavations can be 
made without considerable cost, and with good hope 
of results. But the absence of any really archaic 

1 The fine folio record of the work, edited by Mr. Ernest Gardner, 
with Mr. Schultz's inestimable measurements and drawings, has since 
been published. 



xii MEGALOPOLIS 311 

monument has, till recently, damped the ardour of 
the archaeologists. 

The aspect of the present Megalopolis is very 
pleasing. Its streets are wide and clean, though for 
the most part overgrown with grass, and a single dark 
green cypress takes, as it were, the place of a spire 
among the flat roofs. We found the town in Easter 
holiday, and the inhabitants — at least the men — in 
splendid attire. For the women of the Morea have, 
alas ! abandoned their national costume, and appear in 
tawdry and ill-made dresses. Even the men who have 
travelled adopt the style of third-rate Frenchmen or 
Germans, and go about in tall hats, with a dirty grey 
plaid wrapped about their shoulders. To see these 
shoddy -looking persons among a crowd of splendid 
young men in Palikar dress, with the erect carriage 
and kingly mien which that very tight costume 
produces, is like seeing a miserable street cur among 
a pack of fox-hounds. And yet we were informed 
that, for political reasons, and in order to draw the 
Greeks from their isolation into European habits, the 
national dress is now forbidden in the schools ! 

We were welcomed with excellent hospitality in 
the town, and received by a fine old gentleman, whose 
sons, two splendid youths in full costume, attended us 
in person. Being people of moderate means, they 
allowed us, with a truer friendliness than that of more 
ostentatious hosts, to pay for most of the materials we 
required, which they got for us of the best quality, at 
the lowest price, and cooked and prepared them for 
us in the house. We inquired of the father what 
prospects were open to his handsome sons, who seemed 
born to be soldiers — the ornaments of a royal pageant 
in peace, the stay of panic in battle. He complained 
that there was no scope for their energies. Of course, 
tilling of the soil could never satisfy them. One of 



312 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

them was secretary to the Demarche on some miserable 
salary. He had gone as far as Alexandria to seek his 
fortune, but had come home again, with the tastes 
and without the wealth of a rich townsman. So they 
are fretting away their life in idleness. I fear that 
such cases are but too common in the country towns 
of Greece. 

The people brought us to see many pieces of funeral 
slabs, of marble pillars, and of short and late inscriptions 
built into house walls. They also sold us good coins 
of Philip of Macedon at a moderate price. The 
systematic digging about the old site undertaken by 
the English school has brought to light many import- 
ant remains. There is a carriage road from Megalo- 
polis to Argos, but the portion inside the town was 
then only just finished, so we preferred riding as far 
as Tripoli. Travellers now landing at Argos will find 
it quite practicable to drive from the coast to this 
central plain of Arcadia, and then begin their riding. 
There is now, alas ! a railway from Argos to Tripoli 
in progress. By this means even ladies can easily 
cross the Morea. Two days' driving to Megalopolis, 
two days' riding to Olympia, and an easy day's drive 
and train to Katakalo, would be the absolute time 
required for the transit. But the difficulty is still to 
find a comfortable night's lodging between the first 
and second day's ride, both of them long and fatiguing 
journeys. Andritzena is too near Megalopolis, and 
not to be recommended without introductions. But 
there is probably some village on another route which 
would afford a half-way house. From Tripoli and 
from Megalopolis, which command their respective 
plains, excursions can be made to Mantinea, to Sparta, 
and best of all to Kalamata, where a coasting steamer 
calls frequently. 

As we rode up the slopes of Mount Maenalus, which 



xii TRIPOLITZA 313 

separates the plain of Tegea from that of Megalopolis, we 
often turned to admire the splendid view beneath, and 
count the numerous villages now as of old under the 
headship of the great town. The most striking feature 
was doubtless the snowy ridge of Taygetus, which 
reaches southward, and showed us the course of the 
Eurotas on its eastern side, along which a twelve hours' 
ride brings the traveller to Sparta. The country into 
which we passed was wild and barren in the extreme, 
and, like most so-called mountains in Greece, consisted 
of a series of parallel and of intersecting ridges, with 
short valleys or high plateaus between them. This 
journey, perhaps the bleakest in all Peloponnesus, until 
it approaches the plain of Tegea, is through Mount 
Maenalus, the ancestral seat of the worship of Pan, and 
therefore more than any other tract of Arcadia endowed 
with pastoral richness and beauty by the poets. There 
may be more fertile tracts farther north in these 
mountains. There may in ancient times have been 
forest or verdure where all is now bare. But in the 
present day there is no bleaker and more barren tract 
than these slopes and summits of Maenalus, which are 
wholly different from the richly wooded and well 
carpeted mountains through which we had passed on 
the way from Elis. Even the asphodel, which covers 
all the barer and stonier tracts with its fields of bloom, 
was here scarce and poor. Dull tortoises, and quick- 
glancing hoopoes, with their beautiful head-dresses, 
were the only tenants of this solitude. There was 
here and there a spring of delicious water where we 
stopped. At one of them the best of our ponies, an 
unusually spirited animal, escaped up the mountain, 
with one of our royal-looking young friends, who had 
accompanied us in full costume, for want of other 
amusement, in hot pursuit of him. We thought the 
chase utterly hopeless, as the pony knew his way 



3 H RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

perfectly, and would not let any one approach him on 
the bare hill-sides ; so we consolidated our baggage, 
and left them to their fate. But about two hours 
afterwards the young Greek came galloping after us 
on the pony, which he had caught — he had accom- 
plished the apparently impossible feat. 

At last, after a very hot and stony ride, with less 
colour and less beauty than we had ever yet found in 
Greece, we descended into the great valley of Tripoli, 
formerly held by Tegea at the south, and Mantinea at 
the north. The modern town lies between the ancient 
sites, but nearer to Tegea, which is not an hour's ride 
distant. The old Tripolis, of which the villages were 
absorbed by Megalopolis, is placed by the geographers 
in quite another part of Arcadia, near Gortyn, and due 
north of the western plain. The vicissitudes of the 
modern town are well known ; its importance under 
the Turks, its terrible destruction by the Egyptians 
in the War of Liberation - 9 x even now, though not a 
house is more than fifty years old, it is one of the 
largest and most important towns in the Morea. 

The whole place was on holiday, it being the Greek 
Easter Day, and hundreds of men in full costume 
crowded the large square in the middle of the town. 
There is a considerable manufacture of what are 
commonly called Turkey carpets, and of silk ; but 
the carpets have of late years lost all the beauty and 
harmony of colour for which they were so justly 
admired, and are now copied from the worst Bavarian 
work — tawdry and vulgar in the extreme. They are 
sold by weight, and are not dear, but they were so 

1 It is usually forgotten in recent accounts that this sacking of the 
town was no more than a retribution for the hideous massacre of the 
whole Turkish population, including women and children, in cold blood, 
by the insurgent Greeks. The details may be had in General Gordon'! 
Memoirs or in Finlay's History. t 



xii TRIPOLITZA 315 

exceedingly ugly that we could not buy them. This 
decadence of taste has since been also shown in the 
woollen work of Arachova. 1 

It is my disagreeable duty to state that while the 
inn at Tripoli was no better than other country inns 
in Arcadia, and full of noise and disturbance, the inn- 
keeper, a gentleman in magnificent costume, with a 
crimson vest and gaiters, covered with rich embroidery, 
turned out a disgraceful villain, in fact quite equal to 
the innkeepers of whom Plato in his day complained. 
We had no comforts, we had bad food, we had the 
locks of our baggage strained, not indeed by thieves, 
but by curious neighbours, who wished to see the 
contents ; we had dinner, a night's lodging, and 
breakfast, for which the host charged us, a party of four 
and a servant, 118 francs. And be it remembered that 
the wine of the country, which we drank, is cheaper 
than ale in England. We appealed at once to the 
magistrate, a very polite and reasonable man, who cut 
it down to eighty-four francs, still an exorbitant sum, 
and one which our friend quietly pocketed without 
further remonstrance. It is therefore advisable either 
to go with introductions, which we had (but our party 
was too large for private hospitality), or to stipulate 
beforehand concerning prices. I mention such conduct 
as exceptional — we met it only here, at Sparta, and at 
Nauplia ; but I fear Tripoli is not an honest district. 
A coat and rug which were dropped accidentally from 
a mule were picked up by the next wayfarer, who 
carried them off, though we had passed him but a few 
hundred yards, and there could be no doubt as to the 
owners. Our guides knew his village, and our property 
was telegraphed for, but never reappeared. 

The site of Tegea, where there is now a consider- 
able village, is more interesting, being quite close to 

1 See note, p. 230. 



3 i6 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

the passes which lead to Sparta, and surrounded by a 
panorama of rocky mountains. The morning was 
cloudy, and lights and shadows were coursing alternately 
over the view. There were no trees, but the surface 
of the rocks took splendid changing hues — grey, pink, 
and deep purple — while the rich soil beneath alternated 
between brilliant green and ruddy brown. As the 
plain of Megalopolis reminded me of that of Thebes, 
so this plain of Tegea, though infinitely richer in soil, 
yet had many features singularly like that of Attica, 
especially its bareness, and the splendid colours of its 
barren mountains. But the climate is very different 
at this great height above the sea ; the nights, and 
even the mornings and evenings, were still chilly, and 
the crops are still green when the harvest has begun in 
Attica. There are a good many remains, especially of 
the necropolis of Tegea, to be found scattered through 
the modern village, chiefly in the walls of new houses. 
One of these reliefs contained a very good representa- 
tion of a feast — two men and two women, the latter 
sitting, and alternately with the men ; the whole work 
seemed delicate, and of a good epoch. These and other 
remains, especially an excellent relief of a lion, are now 
gathered into the little museum of the village of Piali, 
which occupies part of the ancient site. The circuit 
of the ancient walls and the site and plan of the great 
temple of Athena Alea have also recently been deter- 
mined. The temple, rebuilt by Scopas about 395 B.C., 
had Corinthian as well as Ionic capitals, though exter- 
nallv Doric in character. Some remarkable remains 
of the pediment, especially a boar's head, are now in 
the Museum at Athens. • 

The way to Argos is a good carriage-road through 
the passes of Mount Parthenion, and is not unlike the 
bleak ride through Masnalus, though there is a great 
deal more tillage, and in some places the hill-sides are 



xii FROM TRIPOLITZA TO ARGOS 317 

terraced with cultivation. It was in this mountain 
that the god Pan met the celebrated runner Pheidip- 
pides, who was carrying his despatch about the Persian 
invasion from Athens to Sparta, and told him he 
would come and help the Athenians at Marathon. 
This Mount Parthenion, bleak and bare like Mount 
Maenalus, and yet like it peculiarly sacred to Pan, 
'affords tortoises most suitable for the making of 
lyres, which the men who inhabit the mountain are 
afraid to catch, nor do they allow strangers to catch 
them, for they think them sacred to Pan.' We saw 
these tortoises, both in Mamalus and Parthenion, yet 
to us suggestive not of harmony but of discord. Two 
of them were engaged in mortal combat by the road- 
side. They were rushing at each other, and battering 
the edges of their shells together, apparently in the 
attemp to overturn each other. After a long and 
even conflict, one of them fled, pursued by the other 
at full speed, indeed far quicker than could be imagined. 
We watched the battle till we were tired, and left the 
pursuer and the pursued in the excitement of their 
deadly struggle. The traveller who goes by the 
new railroad over this ground will never see sights 
like this. 

These were the principal adventures of our tour 
across Arcadia. The following night we rested in 
real luxury at the house of our old guest-friend, Dr. 
Papalexopoulos, whose open mansion had received us 
two years before, on our first visit to Argos. 



CHAPTER XIII 

CORINTH TIRYNS ARGOS NAUPLIA HYDRA — 

-ffiGINA EPIDAURUS 

The Gulf of Corinth is a very beautiful and narrow 
fiord, with chains of mountains on either side, through 
the gaps of which you can see far into the Morea on 
one side, and into northern Greece on the other. But 
the bays or harbours on either coast are few, and so 
there was no city able to wrest the commerce of these 
waters from old Corinth, which held the keys by 
land of the whole Peloponnesus, and commanded 
the passage from sea to sea. It is, indeed, wonderful 
how Corinth did not acquire and maintain the first 
position in Greece. It may, perhaps, have done so in 
the days of Periander, and we hear at various times of 
inventions and discoveries in Corinth, which show 
that, commercially and artistically, it was among the 
leading cities of Greece. But, whenever the relations 
of the various powers become clear, as in the Persian 
or Peloponnesian Wars, we find Corinth always at 
the head of the second-rate states, and never among 
the first. This is possibly to be accounted for by the 
predominance of trade interests, which are the source 
of such material prosperity that men are completely 
engrossed with it, and will not devote time and labour 
to politics, or stake their fortunes for the defence of 

3i8 



chap, xin CORINTH— LECH^EUM 319 

principle. Thus it seems as if the Corinthians had 
been the shopkeepers of Greece. 

But as soon as the greater powers of Greece decayed 
and fell away, we find Corinth immediately taking the 
highest position in wealth, and even in importance. 
The capture of Corinth, in 146 B.C., marks the 
Roman conquest of all Greece, and the art-treasures 
carried to Rome seem to have been as great and 
various as those which even Athens could have pro- 
duced. Its commercial position was at once assumed 
by Delos. No sooner had Julius Caesar restored and 
rebuilt the ruined city, than it sprang at once again 
into importance, 1 while Delos decayed; and among 
the societies addressed in the Epistles of S. Paul, 
none seems to have lived in greater wealth or luxury. 
It was, in fact, well-nigh impossible that Corinth 
should die. Nature had marked out her site as one 
of the great thoroughfares of the old world ; and it 
was not till after centuries of blighting misrule by the 
wretched Turks that she sank into the hopeless decay 
from which not even another Julius Caesar could 
rescue her. 2 

These were our reflections as we passed up the 
gulf on a splendid summer evening, the mountains 
of Arcadia showing their snowy tops of a deep rose 
colour in the setting sun. And passing by iEgion 
and Sikyon, we came to anchor at the harbour of 
Lechaeum. There was a public conveyance which 

1 Strabo mentions that the new settlers, coming upon old tombs in 
the digging for new foundations, found there quantities of graceful pottery, 
which was sold to Romans, and became the fashion there. Hence it 
was diligently sought and sold under the title vtKpoKopivdia. We may 
be sure that every ancient tomb was rifled in this way. 

2 On the foundation of the new Greek kingdom, it was seriously 
debated whether Corinth should not be the capital j but the constant 
prevalence of fever in the district, together with sentimental reasons, 
determined the selection of Athens. 



320 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap, 

took the traveller across the isthmus to Kenchreae, 
where a steamboat was in readiness to bring him 
to Athens. But with the usual absurdity of such 
services, no time was allowed for visiting Corinth and 
its Acropolis. 1 We, however, stayed for the night in 
the boat, and started in the morning for our ride 
into the Peloponnesus. This arrangement was then 
necessary, as the port of Lechaeum did not afford the 

traveller even the luxurv of a decent meal. The 

j 

Greek steamers are, besides, of considerable interest 
to any observant person. They seem always full of 
passengers with their dogs, and as the various classes 
mix indiscriminately on deck, all sorts of manners, 
costume, and culture can be easily compared. 

The fondness of the Greeks for driving a bargain 
is often to be noticed. Thus, a Greek gentleman on 
this boat, perceiving that we were strangers in pursuit 
of art and antiquities, produced two very fine gold 
coins of Philip and Alexander, which he offered 
for ^5. That of Philip was particularly beautiful — 
a very perfect Greek head in profile, crowned with 
laurel, and on the reverse a chariot and four, with the 
legend, QiXlttttos. Not being a very expert judge 
of coins, and supposing that he had asked more than 
the value, I offered him £2: 10s. for this one, which 
was considerably the larger ; but he would not take 
any abatement. He evidently was not anxious to sell 
them, but merely took his chance of getting a good 
price, and investing it again at better interest. Seeing 
that the coin seemed but little heavier than our 
sovereign, and is not uncommon in collections, I 
fancy the price he asked was excessive. The Athenian 
shops, which are notorious for their prices to strangers, 
had similar coins, for which about £4. was asked. On 

1 Even the new railway has not altered this. The journey up and 
aown the bay in a coasting steamer is still well worth undertaking. 



xin CORINTH 321 

this, and a thousand other points, the traveller should 
be instructed by some competent person before he sets 
out. Genuine antiquities seem to me so common in 
Greece, that imitations are hardly worth manufac- 
turing. Even with a much greater market, the 
country can supply for generations an endless store of 
real remains of ancient Greece. But, nevertheless, 
the prices of these things are already very high. The 
ordinary tourist does not infest these shores, so that 
the only seekers after them are enthusiasts, who will 
not hesitate to give even fancy prices for what they 
like. 

The form of the country, as you ascend from 
Lechaeum to Corinth, is very marked and peculiar. 
At some distance from the flat shore the road leads 
up through a steep pass of little height, which is cut 
through a long ridge of rock, almost like a wall, 
and over which lies a higher plateau of land. The 
same feature is again repeated a mile inland, as the 
traveller approaches the site of ancient Corinth. 
These plateaus, though not lofty, are well marked, 
and perfectly distinct, the pass from one up to the 
next being quite sufficient to form a strong place 
of defence against an attacking force. Behind the 
highest plateau rises the great clifF on which the 
citadel was built. But even from the site of the old 
city it is easy to obtain a commanding view of the 
isthmus, of the two seas, and of the Achaean coast 
up to Sikyon. 

The traveller who expects to find any sufficient 
traces of the city of Periander and of Timoleon, and, 
I may say, of S. Paul, will be grievously disappointed. 
In the middle of the wretched straggling modern 
village there stand up seven enormous rough stone 
pillars of the Doric Order, evidently of the oldest 
and heaviest type ; and these are the only visible relic 

Y 



322 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

of the ancient city, looking altogether out of place, 
and almost as if they had come there by mistake. 
These pillars, though insufficient to admit of our 
reconstructing the temple, are in themselves pro- 
foundly interesting. Their shaft up to the capital is of 
one block, about twenty-one feet high and six feet in 
diameter. It is to be observed that over these gigantic 
monoliths the architrave, in which other Greek temples 
show the largest blocks, is not in one piece, but 
two, and made of beams laid together longitudinally. 1 
The length of the shafts (up to the neck of the capital) 
measures about four times their diameter on the 
photograph which I possess ; I do not suppose that 
any other Doric pillar known to us is so stout and 
short. The material is said almost universally to be 
limestone, but if my eyes served me aright, it was 
a very porous and now rough sandstone, not the least 
like the bluish limestone in which the lions of the 
gate of Mycenae are carved. The pillars are said to 
have been covered with stucco, and were of course 
painted. Perhaps even the figures of the pediment 
were modelled in clay, as we are told was the case 
in the oldest Corinthian temples, when first the 
fashion came in of thus ornamenting an otherwise 
flat and unsightly surface. The great temple of 
Paestum — which is, probably, the next oldest, and 
certainly the finest extant specimen of the early Doric 
style — has no figures in the pediment, and seems never 
to have had them, unless, indeed, they were painted in 
fresco on the stucco, with which it was probably 
covered. Those who have seen the temple at Paestum 

1 M. Viollet-le-Duc, in his Entretiens tur P Architecture, vol. i. p. 45, 
explains the reason of this. Apart from the greater facility of raising 
smaller blocks, most limestones are subject to flaws, which are disclosed 
only by strain. Hence it was much safer to support the entablature 
on two separate beams, one of which might sustain, at least temporarily, 
the building, in case the other should crack. 



xin CORINTH 323 

are, perhaps, the only visitors who will be able to 
frame to themselves an image of the very similar 
structure at Corinth, which Turks and earthquakes 
have reduced to seven columns. There must have 
been in it the same simplicity, the same almost 
Egyptian massiveness, and yet the same unity of 
plan and purpose which excludes all idea of clumsiness 
or disproportion. 

The longer we study the Greek orders of 
architecture, the more the conviction grows that the 
Doric is of all the noblest and the most natural. 
When lightened and perfected by the Athenians 
of Pericles's time, it becomes simply unapproachable ; 
but even in older and ruder forms, it is vastly superior 
to either of the more florid orders. All the massive 
temples of Roman times were built in the very ornate 
Corinthian, which may almost be called the Graeco- 
Roman, style ; but, notwithstanding their majesty and 
beauty, they are not to be compared in tone with the 
severer and more religious of the Doric remains. 
I may add that the titles by which the orders are 
distinguished seem ill-chosen and without meaning, 
except, perhaps, that the Ionic was most commonly 
used, and probably invented, in Asia Minor. The 
earliest specimens of the Corinthian Order are at 
Epidaurus, Olympia, and Phigalia ; x the most perfect 
of the Doric is at Athens, while Ionic temples are 
found everywhere. But it is idle to attempt to change 
such definite and well-sanctioned names. 

Straight over the site of the town is the great rock 
known as the Acro-Corinthus. A winding path 
leads up on the south-west side to the Turkish draw- 
bridge and gate, which are now deserted and open ; 
nor is there a single guard or soldier to watch a spot 
once the coveted prize of contending empires. In 

1 Cf. p. 304. 



324 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

the days of the Achaean League it was called one 
of the fetters of Greece, and indeed it requires no 
military experience to see the extraordinary importance 
of the place. Strabo speaks of the Peloponnesus as 
the Acropolis of Greece — Corinth mav fairly be 
called the Acropolis of the Peloponnesus. It runs 
out boldlv from the surging mountain-chains of the 
peninsula, like an outpost or sentry, guarding all 
approach from the north. In days when news was 
transmitted by fire signals, we can imagine how all 
the southern country must have depended on the 
watch upon the rock of Corinth. It is separated bv 
a wide plain of land, ending in the isthmus, from 
the Geranean .Mountains, which belong to a different 
system. 

Next to the view from the heights of Parnassus, 
I suppose the view from this citadel is held the finest 
in Greece. 1 I speak here of the large and diverse 
views to be obtained from mountain heights. To me, 
personally, such a view as that from the promontory 
of Sunium, or, above all, from the harbour of Nauplia, 
exceeds in beauty and interest anv bird's-eve prospect. 
Any one who looks at the map of Greece will see 
how the Acro-Corinthus commands coasts, islands, 
and bays. The dav was too hazv when we stood 
there to let us measure the real limits of the view, 
and I cannot sav how far the eye may reach in 
a clear atmosphere. But a host of islands, the 
southern coasts of Attica and Boeotia, the Acropolis 
of Athens, Salamis and /Egina, Helicon and Parnassus, 
and endless iEtolian peaks were visible in one direc- 

1 Strabo, who had apparently travelled but little through Greece, 
•peaks with admiration of this view, which he had evidently seen. 
The fortress of Karytena is some twenty or thirty feet higher in 
situation and far more picturesque from below, but is too much 
surroundea bv other high mountains to admit of a prospect like that 
from the Acro-Corinthus. 



xiii CORINTH 325 

tion \ while, as we turned round, all the waving 
reaches of Arcadia and Argolis, down to the approaches 
towards Mantinea and Karytena, lay stretched out 
before us. The plain of Argos, and the sea at that 
side, are hidden by the mountains. 1 But without 
going into detail, this much may be said, that if 
a man wants to realise the features of these coasts, 
which he has long studied on maps, half an hour's 
walk about the top of this rock will give him 
a geographical insight which months of reading could 
not attain. 

The surface is very large, at least half a mile each 
way, and is covered inside the bounding wall with 
the remains of a considerable Turkish town, now in 
ruins and totally deserted, but evidently of no small 
importance in the days of the War of Liberation. 
The building of this town was a great misfortune to 
antiquaries, for every available remnant of old Greek 
work was used as material for the modern houses. At 
all parts of the walls may be seen white marble 
fragments of pillars and architraves, and I have no 
doubt that a careful dilapidation of the modern 
abandoned houses would amply repay the outlay. 
There are several pits for saving rain-water, and some 
shallow underground passages of which we could not 
make out the purpose. The pits or tanks must have 
been merely intended to save trouble, for about the 
middle of the plateau, which sinks considerably 
towards the south, we were brought to a passage into 
the ground which led by a rapid descent to the 
famous well of Pirene, 2 the water of which was so 
perfectly clear that we walked into it on going down 

1 See also Guide Joanne, ii. p. 197. 

8 There is another well, evidently of ancient importance, below, 
beside the old city, which is also called Pirene, and was supposed to be 
the outflow of the well on the Acropolis. 



326 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

the steps, as there was actually no water-line visible. 
It was twelve or fourteen feet deep, and perhaps 
twenty -five feet long, so far as we could make it 
out in the twilight underground. The structure of 
marble over the fountain is the only piece of old 
Greek work we could find on the rock. It consists 
of three supports, like pillars, made of several blocks, 
and over them a sort of architrave. Then there is 
a gap in the building, and from the large number of 
fragments of marble lying at the bottom of the well 
we concluded that the frieze and cornice had fallen 
out. The pediment, or rather its upper outline, is still 
in its place, clear of the architrave, and built into the 
rock so as to remain without its supporting cornice. 

There are numerous inscriptions as you descend, 
which I did not copy, because I was informed they 
had already been published, though I have not since 
been able to find them ; but they are, of course, to be 
found in some of the Greek archaeological newspapers. 
They appeared to me at the time to be either hope- 
lessly illegible, or suspiciously clear. This great well, 
springing up near the top of a barren rock, is very 
curious, especially as we could see no outlet. 1 The 
water was deep under the surface, and there was no 
sign of welling up, or of outflow anywhere j but to 
make sure of this would have required a long and 
careful ride round the whole ridge. Our guide-book 
spoke of rushing streams and waterfalls tumbling 
down the rock, which we searched for in vain, and 
which may have been caused by a winter rainfall 
without any connection with the fountain. 2 

1 This is just what Strabo says (viii. 6, § 21) : £icpv<riv fxhv oiK &xpv<nv y 
lxe<TTT)v 5' del diavyovs /cat toti/mov vSaros, and Corinth was one of the 
few Greek places he visited. 

9 So also learned men speak about the amphitheatre. Herzberg (ii. 
353) 8avs : ' Seine Ruine steht noch heute.' Cf. also Friedlander, ii. 883, 
but I could not find it. 



xin THE ISTHMUS 327 

The Isthmus, which is really some three or four 
miles north of Corinth, was of old famous for the 
Isthmian games, as well as for the noted diolkos^ or 
road for dragging ships across. The games were 
founded about 586 B.C., when a strong suspicion had 
arisen throughout Greece concerning the fairness of 
the Elean awards at Olympia, and for a long time 
Eleans were excluded. In later days the games 
became very famous, the Argives or Cleonaeans laying 
claim to celebrate them. It was at these games that 
Philip V. heard of the great defeat of the Romans by 
Hannibal, and resolved to enter into that colossal 
quarrel which brought the Romans into Macedonia. 
The site of the stadium, and of the temple of Isthmian 
Poseidon, and of the fortified sanctuary, were excavated 
and mapped out by M. Monceaux in 1883. A plan 
and details are to be found in the French Guide Joanne? 
Close by I saw in 1889 the interrupted work of the 
canal which was at last to connect the eastern and 
western gulfs, and which when well-nigh completed 
found its funds dissipated by the terrible crash of the 
Credit Mobilier in Paris. It has since been com- 
pleted, but seems of little use. The idea is old and 
often discussed, like that of cutting the Isthmus of Suez. 
The Emperor Nero actually began the work, and the 
engineers of to-day resumed the cutting at the very 
spot where his workmen left off. 

But if this very expensive work might have been of 
great service when sailing ships feared to round the 
notorious Cape of Malea, and when there was great 
trade from the Adriatic to the ports of Thessaly and 
Macedonia, surely all these advantages are now super- 
seded. Steamers coming from the Straits of Messina 
would pay nothing to take the route of the Isthmus in 
preference to rounding the Morea, and the main line 

1 Part ii. pp. 198 sq. (1891). 



328 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

of traffic is no longer to the Northern Levant, but to 
Alexandria. Even goods despatched from Trieste 01 
Venice may now be landed at Patras, and sent on by 
rail to Athens ; so that the canal will now only serve 
the smallest fraction of the Levantine trade ; and even 
then, if the charges be at all adequate to the labour, 
will be avoided by circumnavigation. Amid the pro- 
motions of many schemes of traffic, this undertaking 
seems to me to stand out by its want of common 
sense. Indeed, had it been really important at any 
time we may be sure that the Hellenistic Sovrans or 
Roman capitalists would have carried it out. But in 
classical days their smaller ships seem to have been 
dragged across upon movable rollers by slaves without 
much difficulty. 

But we had already delayed too long upon this 
citadel, where we would have willingly spent a day or 
two at greater leisure. Our guide urged us to start 
on our long ride, which was not to terminate till we 
reached the town of Argos, some thirty miles over the 
mountains. 1 

The country into which we passed was very different 
from any we had yet seen, and still it was intensely 
Greek. All the hills and valleys showed a very white, 
chalky soil, which actually glittered like snow where 
it was not covered with verdure or trees. Road, as 
usual, there was none ; but all these hills and ravines, 
chequered with snowy white, were clothed with 
shining arbutus trees, and shrubs resembling dwarf 
holly. The purple and the white cistus, which is so 
readily mistaken for a wild rose, 2 were already out of 
blow, and showed but a rare blossom. Here and 
there was a plain or valley with great fields of thyme 

1 The reader who performs this journey by train may consider whether 
what here follows is not an older and better way. 

3 iroXAds d£ /ecu ws p68a kI<t6os iiravdei. — Theocr. v. 131. 



xiii THE RIDE TO ARGOS 329 

about the arbutus, and there were herds of goats 
wandering through the shrubs, and innumerable bees 
gathering honey from the thyme. The scene was 
precisely such as Theocritus describes in the uplands 
of Sicily ; but in all our rides through that delightful 
island * we had never found the thyme and arbutus, 
the goats and bees, in such truly Theocritean perfec- 
tion. We listened in vain for the shepherd's pipe, and 
looked for some Thyrsis beguiling his time with the 
oaten reed. It was almost noontide — noon, the hour 
of awe and mystery to the olden shepherd, when the 
irascible Pan, who would not brook disturbance, slept 
his mid-day sleep, 2 and the wanton satyr was abroad, 
prowling for adventure through the silent woods ; so 
that, in pagan days, we might have been afraid of the 
companionship of melody. But now the silence was 
not from dread of Pan's displeasure, but that the sun's 
fiercer heat had warned the shepherds to depart to the 
snowy heights of Cyllene, where they dwell all the 
summer in alpine huts, and feed their flocks on the 
upland pastures, which are covered with snow till late 
in the spring. 

They had left behind them a single comrade, with 
his wife and little children, to protect the weak and 
the lame till their return. We found this family 
settled in their winter quarters, which consisted of a 
square enclosure of thorns (OptyKos dxep8ov\ built up 
with stones, round a very old spreading olive-tree. At 

1 There is a tract of sea-coast on the east side of Italy, about half- 
way between Ancona and Monte Gargano, which has this Theocritean 
character to perfection. Even the railway passenger can appreciate the 
curious contrast it affords to the splendid orchards and gardens about 
Bari, which are farther south. 

8 oi> dtfxis, Si Troi/ufy, to fieayfjLfipivbv, oi> dt/uus Afifiiv 
avpiadew rbv Ilava de8oLKafx.es ' ij yap air' Aypas 
ravlna k€k/j.7)<jos afiwatieTai, £<rri yap irucpbs, 
Kal ol dei dpifieia x°^k irorl fcwl KdOyrai. — Thfocr. i. 15. 



330 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

the foot of the tree were pots and pans, and other 
household goods, with some skins and rude rugs lying 
on the ground. There was no attempt at a roof or 
hut of any kind, though, of course, it might be set up 
in a moment, as we had seen in the denies of Parnassus, 
with skins hung over three sticks — two uprights, and 
the third joining their tops, so as to form a ridge. 

To make the scene Homeric, 1 as well as Theocritean, 
two large and very savage dogs rushed out upon us at 
our approach, but the shepherd hurried out after them, 
and drove them off by pelting them vigorously with 
stones. c Surely,' he said, turning to us breathlessly 
from his exertions, c you had met, O strangers ! with 
some mischief, if I had not been here.' The dogs 
disappeared, in deep anger, into the thicket, and, 
though we stayed at the place for some time, never 
reappeared to threaten or to pursue us on our departure. 
We talked as best we could to the gentle shepherdess, 
one of whose children had a fearfully scalded hand, 
for which we suggested remedies, to her occult and 
wonderful, though at home so trite as to be despised 
by the wise. She gave us in return great bowls of 
heated milk, which was being made into cheese, and 
into various kinds of curds, which are the very best 
produce of the country. They would take no money 
for their hospitality, but did not object to our giving 
the children coins to play with — to them, I am sure, 
a great curiosity. 

Most of our journey was not, however, through 
pastures and plains, but up and down steep ravines, 
where riding was so difficult and dangerous that we 

1 roi/i fxkv 8ye \&e<r<riv dwo x^ ov ^ 8<r<roi> ieipuv 
<pevy£/j.ev tL\p oiriact) SetS/crcero, rprjx^ §& (pwjj 
i)irel\ei fidXa Traaiv, iprjrvaaaKe 5' vXay/xov, 
Xaipiav iv <ppe<rlv fjaiv, odovveicev aftkiv Zpvvro. 

Theocr. xxv. 73, and cf. Odyu. xiv. 29 tq. 



xin THE RIDE TO ARGOS 331 

were often content to dismount and lead our horses. 
Every hour or two brought us to a fountain springing 
from a rock, and over it generally a great spreading 
fig-tree, while the water was framed with a perfect 
turf of maiden -hair fern. The only considerable 
valley which we saw was that of Cleonae, which we 
passed some miles on our left, and about which there 
was a great deal of golden corn, and many shady 
plane-trees. Indeed, the corn was so plentiful that we 
saw asses grazing in it quite contentedly, without any 
interference from thrifty farmers. We had seen a 
very similar sight in Sicily, where the enormous deep- 
brown Sicilian oxen, with their forward - pointing 
horns, were stretching their huge forms in fields of 
half-ripe wheat, which covered all the plain without 
fence or division. There, too, it seemed as if this 
was the cheapest grazing, and as if it were unprofitable 
labour to drive the cattle to some untilled pasture. 
As for the treading-out of corn, I saw it done at 
Argos by a string of seven horses abreast, with two 
young foals at the outside, galloping round a small 
circular threshing-floor in the open field, upon which 
the ripe sheaves had been laid in radiating order. I 
have no doubt that a special observer of farming opera- 
tions would find many interesting survivals both in 
Greece and the Two Sicilies. 

Towards evening, after many hours of travel, we 
turned aside on our way down the plain of Argos, to 
see the famous ruins of Mycenae. But we will now 
pass them by, as the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann, 
here and at Tiryns, and visits to the ruins after his 
excavations, have opened up so many questions that a 
separate chapter must be devoted to them. 

The fortress of Tiryns, which I have already men- 
tioned, and which we visited next day, may fitly be 
commented on before approaching the younger, or at 



332 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

least more artistically finished, Mycenae. It stands 
several miles nearer to the sea, in the centre of the 
great plain of Argos, and upon the only hillock which 
there affords any natural scope for fortification. In- 
stead of the square, or at least hewn, well-fitted blocks 
of Mycenae, we have here the older style of almost 
rude masses piled together as best they would fit, the 
interstices being filled up with smaller fragments, and 
as we now know, faced with mortar. This is essen- 
tially Cyclopean building. 1 There was a palace, of 
rectangular shape, on the southern and highest part of 
the oblong hillock, the whole of which is surrounded 
by a lower wall, which takes in both this and the 
northern longer part of the ridge. It looked, in fact, 
like a hill -fort, with a large enclosure for cattle 
around it. 

Just below the north-east angle of the inner fort, 
and where the lower circuit is about to leave it, there 
is an entrance, with a massive projection of huge 
stones, looking like a square tower, on its right side, 
so as to defend it from attack. The most remarkable 
feature in the walls are the covered galleries, con- 
structed within them at the south-east angle. The 
whole thickness of the wall is often over twenty feet, 
and in the centre a rude arched way is made — or 
rather, I believe, two parallel ways ; but the inner 
gallery has fallen in, and is almost untraceable — and 
this merely by piling together the great stones so as 
to leave an opening, which narrows at the top in the 
form of a Gothic arch. Within the passage there are 

1 Pausanias speaks of Mycenae and Tiryns as of like structure, which 
is not true. He often refers with wonder to these walls, and reflects 
upon the care with which Greek historians had described foreign curio- 
sities like the Pyramids, while equally wonderful things in Greece were 
left unnoticed. Thus, he says that no pair of mules could stir from 
its place the smallest of the blocks in the walls of Tiryns. Cf. ii. 25. 8 j 
and ix. 36. 5. 



xin TIRYNS 333 

five niches in the outer side, made of rude arches, in 
the same way as the main passage. The length of 
the gallery I measured, and found it twenty-five yards, 
at the end of which it is regularly, walled up, so that it 
evidently did not run all the way round. The niches 
are now no longer open, but seem to have been once 
windows, or at least to have had some look-out points 
into the hill country. 

It is remarkable that, although the walls are made 
of perfectly rude stones, the builders have managed to 
use so many smooth surfaces looking outward, that 
the face of the wall seems quite clean and well-built. 1 
At the south-east corner of the higher and inner level 
we found a large block of red granite, quite different 
from the rough grey stone of the building, with its 
surface square and smooth ? and all the four sides neatly 
bevelled, like the portal stones at the treasury of 
Atreus. I found two other similar blocks close by, 
which were likewise cut smooth on the surface, and 
afterwards, in company with Dr. Schliemann, a large 
Doric capital. The intention of these stones we 
could not guess, but they show that some ornament, 
and some more finished work, must have once existed 
in the inner building. Though both the main 
entrances have massive towers of stone raised on their 
right, there is a small postern at the opposite or west 
side, not more than four feet wide, which has no 
defences whatever, and is a mere hole in the wall. 

The whole ruin was covered, when we saw it in 
summer, with thistles, such as English people can 
hardly imagine. The needles at the points of the 



1 There may have been some facing done with stone hammers. The 
same effect is observable in Staigue Fort, in the county of Kerry, and has 
led some people to believe that its stones were rudely fashioned. Cf. the 
splendid photographs of this Irish Tiryns in Lord Dunraven's Notes on 
Irish Architecture. 



334 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap, 

leaves are fully an inch long, extremely fine and 
strong, and as sharp as possible. No clothes except 
a leather dress can resist them. They pierce every- 
where with the most stinging pain, and make anti- 
quarian research in this famous spot a veritable 
martyrdom, which can only be supported by a very 
burning love for knowledge, or the sure hope of 
future fame. The rough masses of stone are so loose 
that one's footing is insecure, and when the traveller 
loses his balance, and falls among the thistles, he will 
wish that he had gone to Jericho instead, or even 
fallen among thieves on the way. 

Such was the aspect of Tiryns when I visited it in 
the years 1875 and 1877. In 1884 I went there 
again with Dr. Schliemann, who was uncovering the 
palace on the height. 

We rode down from Mycenae to Argos late in the 
evening, along the broad and limpid stream of the 
river Inachus, which made us wonder at the old epic 
epithet, very thirsty^ given to this celebrated plain. 1 
Though the night was getting dark, we could see 
and smell great fields of wild rose-red oleander, bloom- 
ing along the river banks, very like the rhodendrons 
of our demesnes. And, though not a bird was to be 
heard, the tettix, so dear to the old Greeks, and so 
often the theme of their poets, was making the land 
echo with its myriad chirping. Aristophanes speaks 
of it as crying out with mad love of the noonday sun. 2 

1 iro\v8L\J/iov. A fragment of Hesiod (quoted by Eustathius in //., 
p. 350) notes this epithet, in order to account for its being no longer 
true, "Apyos dvvdpov k"ov Aavabs Trolqcrev frvSpov. Strabo (viii. p. 256) 
explains it by confining the epithet to the town of Argos, which Homer 
certainly did not, and by admitting that the country was well watered. 
Pausanias (ii. 15. 5) says that all the rivers ran dry, except in rainy 
weather, which is seldom true now. 

2 d\Y avdrjpCbv XeLpabvuv, (pvWcav r iv Ktikwois vatu, 
tjvIk hv 6 decnrecnos 6£u fie'Xos d%^ras 
OdXireaL (ji.ecryfxl3pi.vote i)\LOfiavris /3oa"\ (yfwj, 1092-8.) 



xiii PLAIN OF ARGOS 335 

We found it no less eager and busy in late twilight, 
and far into the night. I can quite understand how 
the old Greek, who hated silence, and hated solitude 
still more, loved this little creature, which kept him 
company even in the time of sleep, and gave him all 
the feelings of cheerfulness and homeliness which we, 
northerns, in our wretched climate, must seek from 
the cricket at the hearth. 

At ten o'clock we rode into the curious dark streets 
of Argos, and, after some difficulty, were shown to 
the residence of M. Papalexopoulos, who volunteered to 
be our host — a medical man of education and ability, 
who, in spite of a very recent family bereavement, 
opened his house to the stranger, and entertained us 
with what may well be called in that country real 
splendour. I may notice that he alone, of all the 
country residents whom we met, gave us wine not 
drenched with resin — a very choice and remarkable 
red wine, for which the plain of Argos is justly cele- 
brated. In this comfortable house we slept, I may 
say, in solitary grandeur, and awoke in high spirits, 
without loss or damage, to visit the wonders of this 
old centre of legend and of history. 

It is very easy to see why all the Greek myths 
have placed the earliest empires, the earliest arts, and 
the earliest conquests, in the plains of Argolis. They 
speak, too, of this particular plain having the benefit 
of foreign settlers and of foreign skill. If we imagine, 
as we must do, the older knowledge of the East 
coming up by way of Cyprus and Crete into Greek 

The little-known lines in the Shield of Hercules are also worth quoting 

(393 w>) '■— 

?)/j.os <rk xKoepQ Kvavdwrepos, rjx^Ta t£ttl$-, 
6£y £<pe£6fji.€vos, dipos avdpdmounv aeldew 
dpxerai, $ re ttSctls kclI j3puicris drj\vs teporj, 
Kai re Trav7]jj,tpi6$ re nal iyos x^ €L o-v8w 
I8ei iv aluordrifi, oirdre xP^ a 2e/ptos ttfrei. 



336 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

waters, there can be no doubt that the first exploring 
mariners, reaching the barren island of Cerigo, and 
the rocky shore of Laconia, would feel their way up 
this rugged and inhospitable coast, till they suddenly 
came in sight of the deep bav of Argolis, stretching 
far into the land, with a broad plain and alluvial soil 
beyond its deepest recess. Here, first, they would 
find a suitable landing-place, and a country fit for 
tillage ; and here, accordingly, we should expect to 
rind, as we actually do, the oldest relics of habitation, 
beyond the huts of wandering shepherds or of savages. 
So the legend tells us that Cvclopes came from Lycia 
to King Prcetus of Argos, or rather of the Argive 
plain, and built him the giant fort of Tiryns. 1 The 
Dorians also came by sea, and the fort of Temenus, 
their leader, was known upon the shore. 

Tiryns was evidently the oldest great settlement. 
Then, by some change of fortune, it seems that 
Mycenae grew in importance, not impossibly because 
of the unhealthy site of Tiryns, where the surround- 
ings are now low and marshy, and were, probably, 
even more so in those days. But the epoch of 
Mycenae's greatness also passed away in historical 
times ; and the third city in this plain came forward 
as its ruler — Argos, built under the huge Larissa, or 
hill- fort, which springs out from the surrounding 
mountains, and stands like an outpost over the city. 2 

1 These Cyclopes, cunning builders, and even workers in metal, are 
to be carefully distinguished from the rude and savage Cyclopes repre- 
sented in Homer's Odyssey as infesting Thrinacria in the western seas. 

2 In the days of the composition of the Iliad we see the power an 
greatness of Mycenae distinctly expressed by the power of Agamemnon, 
who appears to rule over all the district and many islands. Yet the 
great hero, Diomedes, is made the sovereign of Argos and Tiryns in his 
immediate neighbourhood. This difficulty has made some critics sup- 
pose that all the acts of Diomedes were foisted in by some of the Argive 
reciters of the Iliad. Without adopting this theory, I would suggest 
that, in the poet's day, Argos was rapidly growing into first-rate im- 



xin ARGOS— THE THEATRE 337 

Even now it is still an important town, and main- 
tains, in the midst of its smiling and well-cultivated 
plain, a certain air of brightness and prosperity which 
is seldom to be seen elsewhere through the country. 

We went first to visit the old theatre, certainly the 
most beautifully situated, 1 and one of the largest I 
had ever seen. It is even finer than that of Syracuse, 
and whoever has seen this latter will know what such 
a statement implies. If the Greek theatre at Syracuse 
has a view of the great harbour and the coast around, 
this can only have been made interesting by crowded 
shipping and flitting sails, for the whole incline of 
the country is very gradual, and not even the fort of 
Ortygia presents any bold or striking outline. 

The Argive theatre was built to hold an enormous 
audience. We counted sixty-six tiers of seats, in four 
divisions — thus differing from the description of 
Colonel Leake, which we had before us at the time. 
As he observes, there may be more seats still covered 
with rubbish at the bottom — indeed this, like all the 
rest of Argos, ought to yield a rich harvest to the 
antiquary, being still almost virgin soil, and never 
yet ransacked with any care. From the higher seats 
of the theatre of Argos, which rise much steeper 
than those of Syracuse, there is a most enchanting 
prospect to the right, over a rich plain, covered, when 
we first saw it, with the brilliant green of young 
vines and tobacco plants, varied with the darker hue 
of plane-trees and cypresses. After the wilderness 
through which we had passed this prospect was 

portance, while all the older legends attested the greatness of Mycenae. 
Thus the poet, who put together the materials given him by divers older 
and shorter poems, was under the difficulty of harmonising the fresher 
legends about Argos with the older about Mycenae. 

1 I prefer this view even to that from the theatre of Taormina in 
Sicily, which is so justly celebrated, and which many people think the 
finest in Europe. 

I 



338 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

intensely delightful. Straight before us, and to the 
left, was the deep blue bay of Argolis, with the white 
fortifications of Nauplia crowning its picturesque 
Acropolis. All around us, in every other direction, 
was a perfect amphitheatre of lofty mountains. This 
bay is, for its size, the most beautiful I ever saw, and 
the opinion which we then formed was strengthened 
by a sunset view of it from the other side — from 
Nauplia — which was, if possible, even finer, and 
combined all the elements which are conceivable in 
a perfect landscape. Near the theatre there is a 
remnant of Cyclopean building, apparently the angle 
of a wall, made of huge uncut blocks, like those at 
Tiryns. There are said to be some similar sub- 
structures on the Larissa, which is, however, itself 
a mediaeval ruin, and therefore, to us, of slight 
interest. 

All the children about brought us coins, of every 
possible date and description, but were themselves 
more interesting than their coins. For here, in 
southern Greece, in a very hot climate, in a level 
plain, every second child is fair, with blue eyes, and 
looks like a transplanted northern, and not like the 
offspring of a southern race. After the deep-brown 
Italian children, which strike the traveller by their 
southernness all the way from Venice to Reggio, 
nothing is more curious than these fairer children, 
under a sunnier and hotter sky ; and it reminds the 
student at once how, even in Homer, yellow hair and 
a fair complexion are noted as belonging to the King 
of Sparta. This type seems to me common wherever 
there has not arisen a mixed population, such as that 
of Athens or Syra, and where the inhabitants live 
as they have done for centuries. Fallmerayer's 
cleverness and undoubted learning persuaded many 
people, and led many more to suspect, that the old 



xiii THE GREEK TYPE AT ARGOS 339 

Greek race was completely gone, and that the present 
people were a mixture of Turks, Albanians, and 
Slavs. To this many answers suggest themselves, — 
to me, above all things, the strange and accurate 
resemblances in character between ancient and modern 
Greeks, — resemblances which permeate all their life 
and habits. 

But this is a kind of evidence not easily stated in 
a brief form, and consists after all of a large number 
of minute details. The real refutation of Fall- 
merayer's theory consists in exposing the alleged 
evidence upon which it rests. He put forth with 
great confidence citations from MS. authorities at 
Athens, which have not been verified ; nay, he is 
even proved to have been the dupe of some clever 
forgeries. A careful examination of the scanty 
allusions to the state of Greece during the time of 
its supposed Slavisation^ and the evidences obtained 
from the lives of the Greek saints who belong to this 
epoch, have proved to demonstration that the country 
was never wholly occupied by foreigners or deserted 
by its old population. The researches of Ross, 
Ellissen, and lastly of Hopf, 1 have really set the 
matter at rest j but unfortunately English students 
will for some time to come be misled by the evident 
leaning of Finlay towards the Slav hypothesis. As 
has been fairly remarked by later critics, Finlay did 
not test the documents cited by Fallmerayer ; and 
until this was done, the case seemed conclusive 
enough for the total devastation of Greece during 
four hundred years, and its occupation by a new 
population. But all this is now relegated to the 
sphere of fable. There is, of course, a large 

1 Cf. his exhaustive article on the Mediaeval History of Greece, in 
Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopaedia, vol. lxxxv., and more especially hit 
refutation of Fallmerayer '» theory, pp. 100-19. 



340 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

admixture of Slavs and Albanians in the country ; 
the constant invasions and partial conquests for several 
centuries could not but introduce it. Still, Greece 
has remained Greek in the main, and the foreigners 
have not been able to hold their own against the 
stronger nationality of the true Hellenes. 

Another weighty argument seems to me to be 
from language. 1 There is really no great difference 
between the language of Plato and that of the 
present Greeks. There are, of course, development 
and decay, there are changes of idiom and corruptions 
of form, there are a good many Slav names, but the 
language is essentially the same. The present Greek 
will read the old classics with the same trouble with 
which our peasants could read Chaucer. It is, in fact, 
most remarkable, assuming that they are the same 
people, how their language has not changed more. 
Had the invaders during the Middle Ages really 
become the main body of the population, how is it 
that they abandoned their own tongue, and adopted 
that of the Greeks ? Surely there must be at least 
a fusion of different tongues if the population were 
considerably leavened. There are still Albanian 
districts in Greece. They are to be found even 
in Attica, and close to Athens. But these popula- 
tions are still tolerably distinct from the Greeks ; 
their language is quite different, and unintelligible to 
Greeks who have not learned it. 

Again, the Greek language is not one which spread 
itself easily among foreigners, nor did it give rise to a 

* A great authority, whose opinion I deeply respect — Prof. Sayce — 
goes so far as to say that language is by itself no proof of race, but only 
of social contact. I will not venture to deny that there are instances 
where this is so, and where invading strangers have adopted the language 
of the vanquished, though quite foreign to them. But surely this i9 the 
exception, and not the rule, and there is a prima facie probability in 
favour of a well-preserved language indicating a well-preserved race. 



xin THE MODERN HELLENES 341 

number of daughter languages, like the Latin. In 
many Hellenic colonies barbarians learned to speak 
Greek with the Greeks, and to adopt their language 
at the time ; but in all these cases, when the Greek 
influence vanished, the Greek language decayed, and 
finally made way for the old tongue which it had 
temporarily displaced. Thus the evidence of history 
seems to suggest that no foreigners were ever really 
able to make that subtle tongue their own j and even 
now we can feel the force of what Aristotle says — 
that however well a stranger might speak, you could 
recognise him at once by his use of the particles. 1 

These considerations seem to me conclusive that, 
whatever admixtures may have taken place, the main 
body of the people are what their language declares 
them to be, essentially Greeks. Any careful observer 
will not fail to see through the wilder parts of the 
Morea types and forms equal to those which inspired 
the old artists. There are still among the shepherd 
boys splendid lads who would adorn a Greek gym- 
nasium, or excite the praise of all Greece at the 
Olympic games. There are still maidens fit to carry 
the sacred basket of Athene. Above all, there are 
still many old men, fit to be chosen for their stalwart 
beauty to act as thallophori in the Panathenaic 
procession. 

These thoughts often struck us as we went through 
the narrow and crowded streets of Argos, in search of 
the peculiar produce of the place — raw silks, rich- 
coloured carpets and rugs, and ornamental shoes in 
dull red leather. 

We were taken to see the little museum of the 

1 I asked Ernest Renan one day whether he had ever heard a foreigner 
speak, perfect French. He at first said yes, and then alter a pause, added : 
"Mais, monsieur, les particules, les particules /" I don't believe he had ever 
heard of Aristotle's remark. 



342 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

town — then a very small one, with a single inscription, 
and eight or ten pieces of sculpture. But the inscrip- 
tion, which is published, is exceedingly clear and 
legible, and the fragments of sculpture are all both 
peculiar and excellent. There is a female head of 
great beauty, about half life-size, and from the best, 
or certainly a very good, period of Greek art, which 
has the curious peculiarity of one eye being larger 
than the other. It is not merely the eyeball, but the 
whole setting of the eye, which is slightly enlarged, 
nor does it injure the general effect. The gentlemen 
who showed this head to me, and who were all very 
enthusiastic about it, had indeed not noticed this 
feature, but recognised it at once when pointed out 
to them. Beside this trunkless head is a headless 
trunk of equal beauty — a female figure without arms, 
and draped with exquisite grace, in a manner closely 
resembling the famous Venus of Melos. The figure 
has one foot slightly raised, and set upon a duck, as is 
quite plain from the general form of the bird, though 
the webbed feet are much worn away, and the head 
gone. M. Emile Burnouf told me that this attribute 
of a duck would determine it to be either Athene or 
Artemis. If so, the general style of the figure, which 
is very young and slight, speaks in favour of its being 
an Artemis. I trust photographs of this excellent 
statue may soon be made, and that it may become 
known to art students in Europe. 

We also noticed a relief larger than life, on a square 
block of white marble, of the head of Medusa. The 
face is calm and expressionless, exactly the reverse of 
Lionardo da Vinci's matchless painting, but archaic in 
character, and of good and clear workmanship. The 
head-dress, which has been finished only on the right 
side, is very peculiar, and consists of large scales start- 
ing from the forehead, and separating into two plaits, 



xni THE MODERN HELLENES 343 

which become serpents' bodies, and descend in curves 
as low as the chin, then turning upward and outward 
again, till they end in well -formed serpents' heads. 
The left serpent is carved out perfectly in relief, but 
not covered with scales. 

I was unable to obtain any trustworthy account of 
the finding of these marbles, but they were all fresh 
discoveries, especially the Medusa head, which had 
been only lately brought to the museum, when we 
were first at Argos. Future visitors will find this 
valuable collection much increased ; and here, in this 
important town, it is advisable that there should be a 
local museum. 

The site of the famous Horaeon, lying off the 
road from Tiryns to Mycenae to the right on a high 
terrace, has been ransacked by the American school 
under the able direction of Sir Charles Waldstein. 
Pausanias describes a splendid temple there in his day ; 
it was one of the greatest and holiest centres of 
religion in Greece, and the undertaking promised 
great things. Nevertheless the result has been dis- 
appointing. There have been a few fragments of 
sculpture of the first quality found, and illustrated by 
Dr. Waldstein in his handsome monograph with that 
delicate insight for which he is remarkable ; but the 
vast mass of splendid marble work seems to have been 
carried away, or used up in some neighbouring lime- 
kiln. The second volume on the pottery is not yet 
published, and may give us new matter on the develop- 
ment of this artistic industry for which the Greeks 
were so remarkable. 

If we look at Dorian art, as contrasted with Ionian, 
there can be no doubt that the earliest centre was 
Corinth in the Peloponnesus, to which various dis- 
coveries in art are specially ascribed. In architecture 
there were many leading ideas, such as the setting up 



344 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

of clay figures in the tympanum of the temples, and 
the use of panels or soffits, as thev were called, in 
ceilings, which came first from Corinth. But when 
we descend to better- known times, there are three 
other Dorian states which quite eclipse Corinth, I 
suppose because the trading instinct, as is sometimes 
the case, crushed out or weakened her enthusiasm for 
art. These states are iEgina, Sikvon, and Argos. 
Sikvon rose to greatness under the gentle and en- 
lightened despotism of Orthagoras ar.d his ^family, 
of whom it was noticed that thev retained their 
sovereignty longer than any other dvnastv of despots 
in Greece. .Egina seems to have disputed the lead 
with Corinth as a commercial mart, from the davs of 
Pheidon, whose coinage of monev was always said to 
have been first practised at ^Egina. 1 The prominence 
of ^Egina in Pindar's Epinikian Odes shows not onlv 
how eagerly men practised athletics, and loved renown 
there, but how well able they were to pav for expensive 
monuments of their fame. Their position in the 
Persian war, among the bravest of the Greeks, cor- 
roborates the former part of mv statement ; the 
request of an Ionian Greek ladv, captured in the 
train of Mardonius, to be transported to ^Egina, adds 
evidence for the second, as it shows that, to a person 
of this description, JEgina was the field for a rich 
harvest, and we wonder how its reputation can have 
been greater in this respect than that of Corinth. 2 
But, a short time after, the rise of the Athenian 
naval power crushed the greatness of /Egina, it sank to 
insignificance, and was absorbed into the Attic power. 
Thus Sikyon and Argos remained, and it was 
preciselv these two towns which produced a special 

1 Thi3 fact strengthens my conviction that at an early period iEginj 
worked the silver-mines of Laurium. 

* Cf. Pindar's frag, for the Corinthian eraipcu. 



xni ARGIVE SCULPTURE 345 

school of art, of which Polycleitus was the most dis- 
tinguished representative. Dorian sculpture had 
originally started with figures of athletes, which were 
dedicated at the temples, and were a sort of collateral 
monument to the odes or poets — more durable, no 
doubt, in the minds of the offerers, but, as time has 
shown, perishable and gone, while the winged words 
of the poet have not lost even the first bloom of their 
freshness. However, in contrast to the flowing robes 
and delicately chiselled features of the Ionic school, 
the Dorians reproduced the naked human figure with 
great accuracy ; while in the face they adhered to a 
stiff simplicity, regardless of individual features, and 
still more regardless of any expression save that of a 
vacant smile. This type, found in its most perfect 
development in the iEginetan marbles, was what lay 
before Polycleitus when he rose to greatness. He was 
the contemporary and rival of Pheidias, and is said to 
have defeated him in a competition for the temple of 
Hera at Samos, where two or three of the greatest 
sculptors modelled a wounded Amazon, and Polycleitus 
was adjudged the first place. There is some proba- 
bility that one of the Amazons now in the Vatican is 
a copy of this famous work ; and, in spite of a clumsily 
restored head and arms, we can see in this figure the 
great simplicity and truth of the artist in treating a 
rather ungrateful subject — that of a very powerful and 
muscular woman. 

The Argive school, owing to its traditions, 
affected single figures much more than groups j and 
this, no doubt, was the main contrast between Poly- 
cleitus and Pheidias — that, however superior the Argive 
might be in a single figure, the genius of the Athenian 
was beyond all comparison in using sculpture for 
groups and processions as an adjunct to architecture. 
But there was also in the sitting statue of Zeus, at 



346 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Olympia, a certain majesty which seems not to have 
been equalled by any other known sculptor. The 
Attic artist who appears, however, to have been much 
nearer to Polycleitus in style, was Myron, whose 
Discobolus has reached us in some splendid copies, and 
who seems to have had all the Dorian taste for repre- 
senting single athletic figures with more life and more 
daring action about them than was attempted by 
Polycleitus. 1 

Herodotus notices that, at a certain period, the 
Argives were the most renowned in Greece for music. 
It is most unfortunate that our knowledge of this 
branch of Greek art is so fragmentary that we are 
wholly unable to tell in what the Argive proficiency 
consisted. We are never told that the Doric scale 
was there invented ; but, very possibly, they may have 
taken the lead among their brethren in this direction 
also, for it is well known that the Spartans, though 
excellent judges, depended altogether upon foreigners 
to make music for them, and thought it not gentle- 
manly to do more than appreciate or criticise. 

The drive from Argos to Nauplia leads by Tiryns, 
then by a great marsh, which is most luxuriantly 
covered with green and with various flowers, and then 
along a good road all the way into the important and 
stirring town of Nauplia. This place, which was 
one of the oldest settlements, as is proved by Pelasgic 
walls and tombs high up on the overhanging cliffs, 
was always through historv known as the port of 
Argos, and is so still, though it rose under the Turks 
to the dignity of capital (Napoli di Romania) of the 
whole province of Greece. The citadel has at all 
times been considered almost impregnable. The situa- 

1 The bronze cow of Myron seems also to have been a wonderfully 
admired work, to judge from the crowd of epigrams written upon it, 
which still survive. 



xin NAUPLIA 347 

tion of the town is exceptionally beautiful, even for 
a Greek town ; and the sunset behind the Arcadian 
mountains, seen from Nauplia, with the gulf in the 
foreground, is a view which no man can ever forget. 

A coasting steamer, which goes right round the 
Peloponnesus, took us up with a great company, 
which was hurrying to Athens for the elections, and 
carried us round the coast of Argolis, stopping at the 
several ports on the way. This method of seeing 
either Greece or Italy is highly to be commended, 
and it is a great pity that so many people adhere to 
the quickest and most obvious route, thus missing 
many of the really characteristic features in the 
country which they desire to study. Thus the 
Italian coasting steamers, which go up from Messina 
by Naples to Genoa, touch at many not insignificant 
places (such as Gaeta), which no ordinary tourist ever 
sees, and which are nevertheless among the most 
beautiful in all the country. The same may be said 
of the sail from Nauplia to Athens, which leads you 
to Spezza, Hydra, or Idra, as they now call it, to 
Poros and to iEgina, all very curious and interesting 
places to visit. 

The island of Hydra was, in old days, a mere 
barren rock, scarcely inhabited, and would probably 
never have changed its reputation but for a pirate 
settlement in the very curious little harbour, with its 
narrow entrance, which faces the main shore of 
Argolis. As you sail along the straight coast line, 
there seems no break or indentation, when suddenly, 
as if by magic, the rocky shore opens for about fifty 
yards, at a spot marked by several caves in the face of 
the cliff", and lets you see into a circular harbour of 
very small dimensions, with an amphitheatre of rich 
and well-built houses rising up all round the bay. 
Though the water is very deep, there is actually no 



348 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

room for a large fleet, and there seems not a yard of 
level ground, except where terraces have been artifici- 
ally made. High rocks on both sides of the narrow 
entrance hide all prospect of the town, except from 
the point directly opposite the entrance. 1 

The Hydriotes, who were rich merchants, and, I 
suppose, successful pirates in Turkish days, were never 
enslaved, but kept their liberty and their wealth by 
paying a tribute to the Porte. They developed a 
trading power which reminds one strongly of the old 
Greek cities ; and so faithful were they to one another, 
that it was an ordinary habit for citizens to entrust all 
their savings to a captain starting for a distant port, to 
be laid out by him to the best advantage. It is said 
that they were never defrauded of their profits. The 
Turks may, perhaps, have thought that by gentle 
treatment they would secure the fidelity of the 
Hydriotes, whose wealth and power depended wholly 
on Turkish protection ; but they were greatly mis- 
taken. There was, indeed, some hesitation among 
the islanders, when the War of Liberation broke out, 
what part they should take ; for during the great 
Napoleonic wars the Hydriotes, sailing under the 
neutral flag of Turkey, had made enormous profits by 
their carrying trade among the belligerents. They 
lived in great luxury. With the peace of 1815, and 
the reopening of the French and other ports to 
English ships, these profits disappeared, and the 
extravagant hopes of the Hydriotes ended in bank- 
ruptcy. This was probably a main cause of their 
patriotism and of their absolute ingratitude to Turkey. 
However, by far the most brilliant feats in the war 
were those performed by the Hydriote sailors, who 
remind one very much of the Zealanders in the wars 

1 I found, in 1905, that a suburb had so extended the site as to spoil 
this sudden effect. 



xiii HYDRA 349 

of Holland against the Spanish power. Whether their 
bravery has been exaggerated is hard to say : this, at 
all events, is clear, that they earned the respect and the 
admiration of the whole nation, nor is there any nobility 
so recognised in Greek society as descent from the 
Hydriote chiefs who fought for the Liberation. 

With the rise of the nation the wealth and import- 
ance of Hydra has strangely decayed. Probably the 
Peiraeus, with its vast advantages, has naturally regained 
its former predominance, now that every part of the 
coast and every port are equally free. Still, the general 
style and way of living at Hydra reminds one of old 
times ; and if the island itself be sterile, the rich slopes 
of the opposite coast, covered with great groves of 
lemon-trees, are owned by the wealthy descendants of 
the old merchants. 

The neighbouring island of Spezza, where the 
steamer waits, and a crowd of picturesque people 
come out in quaint boats to give and take cargo, has 
a history very parallel to that of Hydra, but it has 
woody slopes which are now becoming a favourite 
summer resort, and show many civilised villas. The 
population of both islands is rather Albanian than 
Greek. A few hours brings the steamer past Poros 
and through narrow passages among islands to iEgina, 
as they now call it. We have here an island whose 
history is precisely the reverse of that of Hydra. The 
great days of JEglna (as I mentioned above) were in 
very old times, from the age of Pheidon of Argos, 
in the seventh century B.C., up to the rise of Athens's 
democracy and navy, when this splendid centre of 
literature, art, and commerce was absorbed in the 
greater Athenian empire. 

There is at present a considerable town on the 
coast, and some cultivation on the hills; but the 
whole aspect of the island is very rocky and barren, 



350 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

and as it can hardly ever have been otherwise, we feel 
at once that the early greatness of iEgina was, like 
that of Hydra in the last century, a purely commercial 
greatness. The people are very hospitable and inter- 
esting. Nowhere in Greece did I see more apparent 
remains of the purest Greek type. Our hostess, in 
particular, was worthy to take her place in the 
Parthenon frieze, and among the children playing on 
the quay there were faces of marvellous beauty. 

A new interest has been created in iEgina since 
1904 by the excavations of Professor Furtwangler, 
whom we found living with his accomplished and 
hospitable wife in the town. The plan and details 
of the temple of Aphrodite Epilimene (of the Harbour) 
were being recovered, and we saw a remarkable figure 
of a sphynx, apparently archaic in style, which was in 
a very complete state, and was set apart in the place 
of honour in the little museum of the town. The 
most characteristic modern product is the sponge. 
The divers come in with their boats full, and a large 
number of people are employed in sorting, cleaning, 
etc. We bought half-a-dozen of the best quality for 
the cost of a single one at home. 

With enterprise and diligence, a trading nation 
or city may readily become great in a small island 
or barren coast, and no phenomenon in history 
proves this more strongly than the vast empire of 
the Phoenicians, who seem never to have owned more 
than a bare tract of a few miles about Tyre and Sidon. 
They were, in fact, a great people without a country. 
The Venetians similarly raised an empire on a salt 
marsh, and at one time owned many important 
possessions on Greek coasts and islands, 'without 
any visible means of subsistence,' as they say in the 
police courts. In the same way Pericles thought 
nothing of the possession of Attica, provided the 



xin iEGINA 351 

Athenians could hold their city walls and their 
harbours. He knew that with a maritime supremacy 
they must necessarily be lords of so vast a stretch of 
coasts and islands that the barren hills of Attica might 
be completely left out of account. 

There are two ways of visiting the famous temple, 
whose frontal ornaments are now in the Glyptothek at 
Munich. The account of their discovery may best 
be read in the fine volume published by Cockerell 
for the Dilettanti Society on Bassae and iEgina. A 
special steamer starts frequently from Piraeus, lands its 
passengers on the coast just under the temple, and 
takes them home again in the evening. To ride 
across the island from the town to the temple is a 
beautiful journey of about three hours, and is still an 
unchanged experience of the riding through Greece 
which fascinated us thirty years ago. There is ample 
time to view the temple, and return again by a 
different road in the evening. There are the usual 
glades, enormous stems of olive-trees, ruins of 
mediaeval castles, little chapels serving as parish 
churches, handsome peasants waiting at the roadside 
inns. The vegetation is lovely — banks of scarlet 
anemones, orchids, irises, flowering trees in abund- 
ance, and at the ascent to the temple a large wood 
of umbrella pines, standing at wide intervals, but 
offering pleasant islands of shade from the morning 
sun. 

Our knowledge of the temple has undergone many 
revisions and corrections since the excavations and 
studies of Professor Furtwangler (190 1-4). In the 
first place the name of the goddess was not Athena, 
but Athaia, to judge from a recovered inscription 
which gives us the name in large capitals. This is 
some local tutelary goddess not otherwise known, but 
anyone who has read in Pausanias's guide-book the 



352 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

innumerable and obscure local cults and gods that 
he found everywhere through Greece, cannot marvel 
at the novelty. Then the recovery of more frag- 
ments of the pediment sculptures, and of the stones 
behind them to which the marble was fixed, has 
suggested to Professor Furtwangler a reconstruction 
of the composition of these figures on which he 
read a most interesting paper before the Archaeological 
Congress at Athens in 1905. Whether the figures 
at Munich will be, or have been, rearranged according 
to his suggestion, I do not know. His arguments 
were very well received by the Congress. 

There is yet another and a very interesting way 
from Nauplia to iEgina, which may be stronglv 
recommended to the traveller who does not arrive 
in due time to catch the weekly steamer. Horses 
can be hired at Nauplia, which can perform, in about 
seven hours, the journey to the little village of New 
Epidauros (now pronounced Epldavros). Here a boat 
can be obtained, which, with a fair wind, can reach 
iEgina in three, and the Peiraeus in about six hours. 
But, like all boating expeditions, this trip is uncertain, 
and may be thwarted by either calm or storm. 

We left Nauplia on a very fine morning, while the 
shepherds from the country were going through the 
streets, shouting yaAa, and serving out their milk 
from skins, of which they held the neck in one hand, 
and loosened their hold slightly to pour it into the 
vessel brought to them by the customer. These 
picturesque people — men, women, and children — seem 
to drive an active trade, and yet are not, I believe, 
to be found in the streets of any other Greek town. 

The way through the Argolic country is rough 
and stony, not unlike in character to the ride from 
Corinth to Mycenae, but more barren, and for the 
most part less picturesque. On some of the hilltops 



xiii SHIPWRECKED 353 

are old ruins, with fine remains of masonry, apparently 
old Greek work. The last two or three hours of the 
journey are, however, particularly beautiful, as the 
path goes along the course of a rich glen, in which 
a tumbling river hurries towards the sea. This glen 
is full of verdure and of trees. We saw it in the 
richest moment of a southern spring, when all the 
trees were bursting into leaf, or decked with varied 
bloom. It was the home, too, of thrushes, and many 
other singing birds, which filled the air with music — 
as it were a rich variation upon the monotonous sound 
of the murmuring river. There is no sweeter concert 
than this in nature, no union of sight and sound which 
fills the heart of the stranger in such a solitude with 
deeper gladness. I know no fitter exodus from the 
beautiful Morea — a farewell journey which will dwell 
upon the memory, and banish from the mind all 
thoughts of discomfort and fatigue. 

In the picturesque little land-locked bay of 
Epidavros there was a good-sized fishing-boat riding 
at anchor, which we immediately chartered to convey 
us to Athens. The skipper took some time to gather 
a crew, and to obtain the necessary papers from the 
local authorities, but after some pressure on our part 
we got under weigh with a fair wind, and ran out 
of the harbour into the broad rock-studded sheet of 
water which separates Argolis from iEgina, and from 
the more distant coast of Attica. There is no more 
delightful or truly Greek mode of travelling than to 
run through islands and under rocky coasts in these 
boats, which are roomy and comfortable, and, being 
decked, afford fair shelter from shower or spray. But 
presently the wind began to increase from the north- 
west, and our skipper to hesitate whether it were safe 
to continue the journey. He proposed to run into 
the harbour of JEgina. for the night. We acquiesced 



354 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

without demur, and went at a great pace to our new 
destination. But no sooner had we come into the 
harbour, and cast anchor, so that the boat lay steady 
with her head to the wind, than another somewhat 
larger boat which came sailing in after us ran right 
into her amidships. The shock started up all my 
companions, who were lying asleep in the bottom 
of the boat, and the situation looked rather desperate, 
for we were in the middle of a wide roadstead, a long 
way from land. It was night, and blowing hard, and 
all our crew betook themselves to weeping and pray- 
ing, while the other boat did her best to sheer off and 
leave us to our fate. However, some of us climbed 
into her by the bowsprit, which lay across our deck, 
while others got up the baggage, and proceeded to 
examine at what pace the water was coming in. A 
boat from the shore came out in time to take us off 
safely, but when we had landed, our skipper gravely 
proposed that we should pay for the boat, as she was 
injured in our service ! Of course we laughed him 
to scorn, and having found at iEgina a steam-launch 
belonging to Captain Miaoulis, then Minister of 
Marine, we went in search of him, and besought him 
to take us next day to the Peiraeus. The excellent 
man not only granted our request, but entertained us 
on the way with the most interesting anecdotes of his 
stay in England as a boy, when he came with his 
father to seek assistance from our country during the 
War of Liberation. Thus we came into the Peiraeus, 
not as shipwrecked outcasts, but under the protection 
of one of the most gallant and distinguished officers 
of the Greek navy. 

A great point of interest among newly discovered 
sites is the great temple and theatre of Epidaurus, 
which I did not then visit, on account of an epidemic 
of small-pox — €v<f>\oyla they call it, euphemistically. 



xiii EPIDAVROS 355 

The very journey to this place is worth making, on 
account of its intensely characteristic features. You 
start from Athens in a coasting steamer full of natives, 
who carry with them their food and beds, and camp 
on deck where it pleases them, regardless of class. 
You see all the homeliness of ordinary life, obtruded 
upon you without seeking it, instead of intruding 
upon others to find it; and you can study not only 
the country, but the people, at great leisure. But the 
ever-varying beauty of the scene leaves little time for 
other studies. The boat passes along iEgina, and 
rounds the promontory of Kalauria — the death-scene 
of Demosthenes — into the land-locked bay of Poros, 
where lay the old Trcezen and Hermione along the 
fruitful shore, surrounded by an amphitheatre of lofty 
mountains. The sea is like a fair inland lake, studded 
with white sails, and framed with the rich green of 
vines and figs and growing corn. Even the rows 
of tall solemn cypresses can suggest no gloom in such 
a landscape. From here it is but a short ride to the 
famous temple of iEsculapius, though most people go 
from Nauplia, a long but easy drive on a good road. 
We pass between picturesque but bare hills, and 
long flats of country which was once forest, then 
brake, but now threatens to become a mere barren 
waste. For the goats and sheep browse upon the 
shrubs, and still worse, the natives dig up the roots 
for fuel, and we met dozens of donkeys on the way 
bringing loads of such roots home for burning. 
There is, in fact, owing to the utter want of economy 
in the management of the country, an increasing 
scarcity of fuel, which will become a very serious 
danger. I heard the Crown Princess of Greece 
speak with good knowledge and great feeling of this 
difficulty. The disappearance of wood affects also 
the climate, and permits sudden thunder -showers to 



356 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

wash away the remaining soil from the steep slopes. 
Would that Greek politicians would turn their atten- 
tion to these matters, in preference to foreign politics ! 
The excavations of the Greek Archaeological Society 
have laid bare at least three principal buildings in con- 
nection with the famous spot ; the old temple of the 
god, the theatre, and the curious tholos^ a circular 
building in which those who had been healed of 
diseases set up votive tablets. The extraordinary size 
and splendour of the theatre — Pausanias says it was 
far the finest in Greece — rather contrasts with the 
dimensions of the temple, and suggests that most of 
the patients who came were able to enjoy themselves, 
or else that many people came for pleasure, and not 
on serious business. So also the circular building, 
which was erected under the supervision of a younger 
Polycleitus (not the great Argive sculptor and rival of 
Pheidias), has many peculiar features, and shows in one 
more instance that what earlier art-critics assumed as 
modern was based on older classical models. Circular 
buildings supported on pillars were thought rather 
Graeco-Roman than Greek, but here we see that, like 
the builders of the Odeon of Pericles, of the later 
Philippeion at Olympia, so the Epidaurians had this 
form before them from early days. Inside the outer 
row of Doric pillars was a second circle of pillars, 
apparently Ionic as to proportions and fluting, but 
the capitals were Corinthian, so that this feature also 
in architecture has a respectable antiquity, and was not 
Graeco-Roman as was once supposed. For a long 
time the so-called Lantern of Demosthenes, built for 
Lysicrates at Athens in 335 B.C., when Alexander 
was leading his army into Asia, was considered the 
oldest, and perhaps the only pure Greek example of 
the Corinthian capital. People began to hesitate when 
a solitary specimen was found in the famous temple 



xin EPIDAVROS 357 

of Bassae, where it could hardly have been imported 
in later days. Now the evidence is completed, and in 
this respect the historians of art are correcting the 
generalisation of their predecessors. 

As regards the general aspect of the temple, theatre, 
and ruins, which have been carefully uncovered and dis- 
cussed by M. Kavvadias for the Archaeological Society 
of Athens, they strike the visitor with their Hellenistic 
rather than their Hellenic flavour. The place was 
very fashionable in later Greek, and Roman, days, 
and the remains of large hotels to accommodate 
strangers, and the general character of the inscrip- 
tions, reveal to us a sort of ancient Lourdes, where 
quackery replaced sound medicine and surgery. M. 
Kavvadias, in an interesting paper read before the 
Congress at Athens in 1905, laid stress upon this 
feature, in contrast to the scientific school of Kos, 
from which we have the traditions of the great 
Hippocrates. So true is it, that we have in ancient 
Greece quite a modern aspect, and the fashions of a 
decadent civilisation. 



CHAPTER XIV 

KYNURIA SPARTA MESSENE 

Whatever other excursions a traveller may make in 
the Morea, he ought not to omit a trip to Sparta, 
which has so often been the centre of power, and is 
still one of the chief centres of- attraction, in Greece. 
And yet many reasons conspire to make this famous 
place less visited than the rest of the country. It is 
distinctly out of the way from the present starting- 
points of travel. To reach it from Athens, or even 
from Patras or Corinth, requires several days, and it is 
not remarkable for any of those remains of classical 
building which are more attractive to the modern 
inquirer than anything else in this historic country. 1 

Of the various routes we chose (in 1884) that 
from Nauplia by Astros, as we had been the guests 
for some days of the hospitable Dr. Schliemann, who 
was prosecuting his researches at Tiryns. So we 
rose one morning with the indefatigable doctor before 
dawn, 2 and took a boat to bring us down the coast to 
Astros. The morning was perfectly fair and calm, 
and the great mountain chains of the coast were 
mirrored in the opal sea, as we passed the picturesque 

1 Just as I am writing these words (1907) news comes to us that an 
important temple, probably the so-called bronze house of Athena, has 
been discovered by the students of the English school. 

8 Cf. the account of his habits in his work, Tiryns, cap. i. 

358 



chap, xiv ASTROS 359 

rocky fort, which stands close to Nauplia in the bay, 
the residence of the public executioner. The beauty 
of the Gulf of Argos never seemed more perfect than 
in the freshness of the morning, with the rising sun 
illuminating the lofty coasts. Our progress was at 
first by the slow labour of the oar, but as the morning 
advanced there came down a fresh west wind from 
the mountains, which at intervals filled our lateen sail 
almost too well, and sent us flying along upon our 
way. In three hours we rounded a headland, and 
found ourselves in the pretty little bay of Astros. 

Of course the whole population came down to see 
us. They were apparently as idle, and as ready to 
be amused, as the inhabitants of an Irish village. 
But they are sadly wanting in fun. You seldom hear 
them make a joke or laugh, and their curiosity is 
itself curious from this aspect. After a good deal of 
bargaining we agreed for a set of mules and ponies to 
bring us all the way round the Morea, to Corinth if 
necessary, though ultimately we were glad to leave 
them at Kyparissia, at the opposite side of Pelopon- 
nesus, and pursue our way by sea. The bargain was 
eight drachmas per day for each animal •> a native, or 
very experienced traveller, could have got them for 
five to six drachmas. 

Our way led us up a river-course, as usual, through 
fine olive-trees and fields of corn, studded with scarlet 
anemones, till after a mile or two we began to ascend 
from the level of the coast to the altitudes of the 
central plateau, or rather mountain system, of the 
Morea. Here the flora of the coast gave way to 
fields of sperge, hyacinths, irises, and star of Bethlehem. 
Every inch of ascent gave us a more splendid and 
extended view back over coasts and islands. The 
giant tops of the inner country showed themselves 
still covered with snow. We were in that district so 



360 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

little known in ancient history, which was long 1 
bone of contention between Argos and Sparta, whose 
boundaries seem never to have been fixed by any 
national landmark. When we had reached the top of 
the rim of inland Alps, we ascended and descended 
various steeps, and rounded manv glens, reaching in 
the end the village of Hagios Petros, which we had 
seen before us for a long time, while we descended 
one precipice and mounted another to attain our 
goal. It was amusing to see our agogiata or mule- 
teers pulling out fragments of mirrors, and arranging 
their toilet, such as it was, before encountering the 
criticism of the Hagiopetrans. One of these men 
was indeed a handsome soldierly youth, who walked 
all dav with us for a week over the roughest country, 
in miserable shoes, and yet without apparent fatigue. 

Another, a great stout man with a beard, excused 
himself for not being married by saying he was too 
little (ehac /u/cpos), and so we learned that as they are 
all expected to marry, and do marry, twenty-five is 
considered the earliest proper age. One would almost 
think thev had preserved some echo of Aristotle's 
views, which make thirty years the best age for 
marriage — thirty years ! when most of us are already 
so old as to have lost interest in these great pleasures. 

At Hagios Petros we were hospitably received by 
the demarch, a venerable old man with a white beard, 
who was a physician, unfortunately also a politician, 
and who insisted on making a thousand inquiries 
about Mr. Gladstone and Prince Bismarck, while we 
were starving and longing for dinner. Some fish, 
which the muleteers had providently bought at Astros 
and brought with them, formed the best part of the 
entertainment, if we except the magnificent creature, 
adorned in all his petticoats and colours and knives, 
who came in to see us before dinner, and kissed our 



xiv HAGIOS PETROS 361 

hands with wonderful dignity, but who turned out to 
be the waiter at the table. We asked the demarch 
how he had procured himself so stately a servant, and 
he said he was the clerk in his office. It occurred to 
us, when we watched the grace and dignity of every 
movement in this royal-looking person, how great an 
effect splendid costume seems to have on manners. 
It was but a few days since that I had gone to a very 
fashionable evening party at a handsome palace in 
Athens, and had been amused at the extraordinary 
awkwardness with which various very learned men — 
professors, archaeologists, men of independent means 
— had entered the room. The circle was, I may add, 
chiefly German. Here was a man, ignorant, acting 
as a servant and yet a king in demeanour. But how 
could you expect a German professor in his miserable 
Frankish dress to assume the dignity of a Greek in 
palicar costume, in forty yards of petticoat, his waist 
squeezed with female relentlessness, with his ruby 
jacket and gaiters, his daggers and pistols at his belt ? 
After all, stately manners are hardly attainable, as a 
rule, without stately costume. 

We were accommodated as well as the worthy 
demarch could manage for the night. As a special 
favour I was put to sleep into his dispensary, a little 
chamber full of galley-pots, pestles, and labelled bottles 
of antiquated appearance, and dreamt in turns of the 
study of Faust and of the apothecary's shop in Mantua, 
as we see them upon the stage. 

Early in the morning we climbed a steep ascent to 
attain the high plateau, very bleak and bare, which is 
believed by the people to have been the scene of the 
conflict of Othryades and his men with the Argive 
300. A particular spot is still called o-tovs <pov€v- 
fievovs^ the place of the slain. The high plain, about 
3500 feet above the sea, was all peopled with country- 



362 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

folk coming to a market at Hagios Petros, and we had 
ample opportunity of admiring both the fine manly 
appearance and the excellent manners of this hardy 
and free peasantry. The complex of mountains in 
which they live is the chain of Parnon, which extends 
from Thyreatis through Kynuria down to Cape Malea, 
but not without many breaks and crossings. The 
heights of Parnon (now called Malevo) still hid from 
us the farther Alps of the inner country. 

After a ride of an hour or two we descended to the 
village of Arachova, much smaller and poorer than its 
namesake in Phocis (above, p. 229), and thence to the 
valley of a stream called Phonissa, the murderess, from 
its dangerous floods, but at the moment a pleasant and 
shallow brook. Down its narrow bed we went for 
hours, crossing and recrossing it, or riding along its 
banks, with all the verdure gradually increasing with 
the change of climate and comfort of shelter, till at 
last a turn in the river brought us suddenly in sight 
of the brilliant serrated crest of Taygetus, glitter- 
ing with its snow in the sunshine. Then we knew 
our proper landmark, and felt that we were indeed 
approaching Sparta. 

But we still had a long way to ride down our river 
till we reached its confluence with the Eurotas, near 
to which we stopped at a solitary khan, from which 
it is an easy ride to visit the remains of Sellasia. 
During the remaining three hours we descended the 
banks of the Eurotas, with the country gradually 
growing richer, and the stream so deep that it could 
no longer be forded. There is a quaint high mediaeval 
bridge at the head of the vale. On a hot summer's 
afternoon, about five o'clock, we rode, dusty and tired, 
into Sparta. 

The town was on holiday, and athletic sports were 
going on in commemoration of the establishment of 



xiv SPARTA 363 

Greek liberty. Crowds of fine tall men were in the 
very wide regular streets, and in the evening this new 
town vindicated its ancient title of evpvxopos. But 
the very first glance at the surroundings of the place 
was sufficient to correct in my mind a very wide- 
spread error, which we all obtain from reading the 
books of people who have never studied history on the 
spot. We imagine to ourselves the Spartans as hardy 
mountaineers, living in an alpine country with sterile 
soil, the rude nurse of liberty. They may have been 
such when they arrived in prehistoric times from the 
mountains of Phocis, but a very short residence in 
Laconia must have changed them. The vale of Sparta 
is the richest and most fertile in Peloponnesus. The 
bounding chains of mountains are separated by a 
stretch, some twenty miles wide, of undulating hills 
and slopes, all now covered with vineyards, orange 
and lemon orchards, and comfortable homesteads or 
villages. The great chain on the west limits the vale 
by a definite line, but towards the east the hills that 
run towards Malea rise very gradually and with many 
delays beyond the arable ground. The old Spartans 
therefore settled in the richest and best country avail- 
able, and must from the very outset of their career 
have had better food, better climate, and hence much 
more luxury than their neighbours. 

We are led to the same conclusion by the art- 
remains which are now coming to light, and which 
are being collected in the well-built local museum 
of the town. They show us that there was an 
archaic school of sculpture, which produced votive 
and funeral reliefs, and therefore that the old Spartans 
were by no means so opposed to art as they have been 
represented in the histories. The poetry of Alkman, 
with its social and moral freedom, its suggestions of 
luxury and good living, shows what kind of literature 



364 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

the Spartan rulers thought fit to import and encourage 
in the city of Lycurgus. The whole sketch of 
Spartan society which we read in Plutarch's Life and 
other late authorities seems rather to smack of 
imaginary reconstruction on abstract principles than 
of historical reality. Contrasts there were, no doubt, 
between Dorians and Ionians, nay, even between 
Spartan and Tarentine or Argive Dorians \ but still 
Sparta was a rich and luxurious society, as is confessed 

on all hands where there is anv mention of the 

j 

ladies and their homes. We might as well infer 
from the rudeness of the dormitories in the College 
at Winchester, or from the simplicity of an English 
man-of-war's mess, that our nation consisted of rude 
mountaineers living in the sternest simplicity. 

But if I continue to write in this way I shall have 
all the pedants down upon me. Let us return to the 
Sparta of to-day. We lodged at a very bad and dear 
inn, and our host's candid excuse for his exorbitant 
prices was the fact that he very seldom had strangers 
to rob, and so must plunder those that came without 
stint. His formula was perhaps a little more decent, 
but he hardly sought to disguise the plain truth. 
When we sought our beds, we found that a very 
noisy party had established themselves below to 
celebrate the Feast of the Liberation, with supper, 
speeches, and midnight revelry. 

So, as usual, there was little possibility of sleep. 
Moreover, I knew that we had a very long day's 
journey before us to Kalamata, so I rose before the 
sun and before my companions, to make preparations 
and to rouse the muleteers. 

On opening my window, I felt that I had attained 
one of the strange moments of life which can never 
be forgotten. The air was preternaturally clear and 
cold, and the sky beginning to glow faintly with the 



xiv TAYGETUS 365 

coming day. Straight before me, so close that it 
almost seemed within reach of voice, the giant 
Taygetus stood up into the sky, its black and purple 
gradually brightening into crimson, and the cold 
blue-white of its snow warming into rose. There 
was a great feeling of peace and silence, and yet a 
vast diffusion of sound. From the whole plain, with 
all its homesteads and villages, myriads of cocks were 
proclaiming the advent of the dawn. I had never 
thought there were so many cocks in all the world. 
The ever - succeeding voices of these countless 
thousands kept up one continual wave of sound, un- 
like anything I ever heard ; and yet for all that, there 
was a feeling of silence, a sense that no other living 
thing was abroad, an absolute stillness in the air, a 
deep sleep over the face of nature. 

How long I stood there, and forgot my hurry, I 
know not, but starting up at last as the sun struck 
the mountain, I went down, and found below stairs 
another curious contrast. All over the coffee-room 
(if 1 may so dignify it) were the remains of a 
disorderly revel, ashes and stains and fragments in 
disgusting confusion ; and among them a solitary 
figure was mumbling prayers in the gloom to the 
image of a saint with a faint lamp burning before it. 
In the midst of the wrecks of dissipation was the 
earnestness of devotion, prayer in the place of ribaldry ; 
oerhaps, too, dead formalism in the place of coarse but 
real enjoyment. 

We left for Mistra before six in the morning, so 
escaping some of the parting inspection which the 
whole town was ready to bestow upon us. The way 
led us past many orchards, where oranges and lemons 
were growing in the richest profusion on great trees, 
as large as the cherry-trees in the Alps. The branches 
were bending with their load, and there was fruit 



366 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

tumbled into the grass, and studding the ground in 
careless plenty with its ruddy and pale gold. In 
these orchards, with their deep -green masses oi 
foliage, the nightingales sing all day, and we heard 
them outcarolling the homelier sounds of awakening 
husbandry. During all the many rides I have taken 
through Greece, no valley ever struck me with 
the sense of peace and wealth so much as that of 
Sparta. 

After an hour we reached the picturesque town 
of Mistra, now nearly deserted, but all through the 
Middle Ages the capital of the district, nestled under 
the shelter of the great fortress of the Villehardouins, 
the family of the famous chronicler. Separated by 
a deep gorge (or langada) with its torrent from the 
loftier mountain, this picturesque rock with its fortress 
contains the most remarkable mediaeval remains, 
Latin, Greek, Venetian, Turkish, in all the Morea. 
Villehardouins and Paleologi made it their seat of 
power, and filled it with churches and palaces to which 
I shall return when we speak of mediaeval Greece. 
An earthquake about 1833 destroyed many of the 
houses, and the population then founded the new 
Sparta, with its wide, regular streets, on the site 
oi the old classical city. This resettlement is not 
so serious a hindrance to archaeology as the rebuilding 
of Athens, for we know that in the days of its real 
greatness Sparta was a mere aggregate of villages, and 
the walls and theatre which are still visible must have 
been built in late Greek or Roman times. The 
so-called tomb of Leonicas, a square chamber built 
with huge blocks of ashlar masonry, of which three 
courses remain, appears like building of the best period, 
but its history is wholly unknown. 

We reached in another hour the village of Trypi, 
at the very mouth of the great pass through Taygetus, 



xiv THE LANGADA PASS 367 

— a beautiful site, with houses and forest trees standing 
one above the other on the precipitous steep ; and 
below, the torrent rushing into the plain to join the 
Eurotas. It is from this village that we ought to 
have started at dawn, and where we should have spent 
the previous night, for even from here it takes eleven 
full hours to reach Kalamata on the Gulf of Messene. 
The traveller should send on his ponies, or take them 
to Mistra and thence to Trypi on the previous after- 
noon. The lodging there is probably not much worse 
than at Sparta. 

From this point we entered at once into the great 
Langada Pass, the most splendid defile in Greece — 
the only way from Sparta into Messene for a distance 
of thirty miles north and south. It is indeed possible 
to scale the mountain at a few other points, but only 
by regular alpine climbing, whereas this is a regular 
highway ; and along it strings of mules, not without 
trouble, make their passage daily, when the snow does 
not lie, from Sparta and from Kalamata. 

Nothing can exceed the picturesqueness and beauty 
of this pass, and nothing was stranger than the contrast 
between its two steeps. That which faced south was 
covered with green and with spring flowers — pale 
anemones, irises, orchids, violets, and, where a stream 
trickled down, with primroses — a marsh plant in 
this country. All these were growing among great 
boulders and cliffs, whereas on the opposite side the 
whole face was bleak and barren, the rocks being 
striated with rich yellow and red veins. I suppose in 
hot summer these aspects are reversed. High above 
us, as it were, looking down from the summits, were 
great forests of fir-trees — a gloomy setting to a 
grandiose and savage landscape. The day was, as 
usual, calm and perfectly fine, with a few white clouds 
relieving the deep blue of the sky. As we were 



368 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

threading our way among the rocks of the river-course 
we were alarmed by large stones tumbling from above, 
and threatening to crush us. Our guides raised all 
the echoes with their shouts to warn any unconscious 
disturber of this solitude that there were human beings 
beneath, but on closer survey we found that our pos- 
sible assassins were only goats clambering along the 
precipice in search of food, and disturbing loose 
boulders as they went. 

Farther on we met other herds of these quaint 
creatures, generally tended by a pair of solitary 
children, who seemed to belong to no human kin, 
but, like birds or flowers, to be the natural denizens 
of these wilds. They seemed not to talk or play ; we 
never heard them sing, but passed them sitting in a 
strange vague listlessness, with no wonder, no curiosity, 
in their deep solemn eyes. There, all the day long, 
they heard no sound but the falling water, the tinkling 
of their flocks, and the great whisper of the forest 
pines when the breeze touched them on its way down 
the pass. They took little heed of us as we passed, 
and seemed to have sunk from active beings into mere 
passive mirrors of the external nature around them. 
The men with us, on the other hand, were constantly 
singing and talking. They were all in a strange 
country which they had never seen j a serious man 
with a gun slung round his shoulder was our guide 
from Try pi, and so at last we reached the top of the 
pass, about 4000 feet high, marked by a little chapel 
to S. Elias, and once by a stone pillar stating the 
boundary between Sparta and Messene. It was up 
this pass, and among these forests, that the young 
Spartans had steeled themselves by hunting the wolf 
and the bear in peace, and by raids and surprises in 
days of war. 

The descent was longer and more varied ; some- 



xiv KALAMATA 369 

times through well-cultivated olive-yards, mulberries, 
and thriving villages, sometimes along giant slopes, 
where a high wind would have made our progress 
very difficult. Gradually the views opened and 
extended, and in the evening we could see down to 
the coast of Messene, and the sea far away. But we 
did not reach Kalamata till long after nightfall, and 
rested gladly in a less uncomfortable inn than we had 
yet found in the journey. 

The town is a cheery and pleasant little place, with 
remains of a large mediaeval castle occupied by Franks, 
Venetians, Turks, which was the first seat of the 
Villehardouins, and from which they founded their 
second fort at Mistra. The river Nedon here runs 
into the sea, and there is a sort of open roadstead for 
ships, where steamers call almost daily, and a good 
deal of coasting trade (silk, currants, etc.) goes on. 
The only notable feature in the architecture is the 
pretty bell tower of the church, of a type which I 
afterwards saw in other parts of Messenia, but which 
is not usual in these late Byzantine buildings. 

As there was nothing to delay us here, we left next 
morning for the convent of Vourkano, from which we 
were to visit Mount Ithome, and the famous ruins of 
Epaminondas's second great foundation in Peloponnesus 
— the revived Messene. The plain (called Macaria or 
Felix from its fertility) through which we rode was 
indeed both rich and prosperous, but swampy in some 
places and very dusty in others. There seemed to be 
active cultivation of mulberries, figs, olives, lemons, 
almonds, currant-grapes, with cactus hedges and plenty 
of cattle. There were numerous little pot-houses 
along the road, where mastic and lucumia were sold, 
as well as dried fruit and oranges. If the Nedon was 
broad and shallow, we found the Pamisos narrow and 
deep, so that it could only be crossed by a bridge. A 

2 B 



370 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

few hours brought us to the ascent of Mount Ithome, 
on a high shoulder of which is situated the famous and 
hospitable convent of Vourkano (or Voulkano). 

The building, very picturesquely situated high on 
the side of Mount Ithome, commands a long slope 
covered with brushwood and wild-flowers, the ideal 
spot for a botanist, as manv rills of water run down 
the descent and produce an abundant and various 
vegetation. There is not a sod of soil which does not 
contain bulbs and roots of flowers. Below stretches 
the valley of Stenyclarus, so famous in the old annals 
of Messene. It was studded with groves of orange 
and lemon, olive and date, mulberry and fig. The 
whole of this country has an aspect far more southern 
and subtropical than any part of Laconia. 

The monks treated us with great kindness, even 
pressing us to sit down to dinner before any ablutions 
had been thought of, and while we were still covered 
with the dust of a very hot and stormy journey along 
high roads. The plan of the building, which is not 
old, having been moved down from the summit in the 
eighteenth century, is that of a court closed with a 
gateway, with covered corridors above looking into the 
court, and a very tawdry chapel occupying its centre. 
It seemed a large and well-to-do establishment, a sort of 
Greek Monte Cassino in appearance ; and with the same 
stir of country people and passing visitors about it. 
Far above us, on the summit of Mount Ithome — the 
site of human sacrifices to Zeus Ithomates in days of 
trouble — we saw a chapel on the highest top, 2500 
feet over the sea. Here they told us that a solitary 
anchorite spent his life, praying and doing service at 
his altar, far above the sounds of human life. We 
made inquiry concerning the history of this saint, 
who was once a wealthy Athenian citizen, with a 
wife and family. His wife was dead, and his sons 



xiv MESSENE 371 

settled in the world, so he resolved to devote the rest 
of his years to the service of God apart from the ways 
of men. Once a fortnight only he descended to the 
convent, and brought up the necessary food. On his 
lonely watch he had no company but timid hares, 
travelling quail, and an occasional eagle, that came 
and sat by him without fear, perhaps in wonder at 
this curious and silent friend. The monks below had 
often urged him to catch these creatures for their 
benefit, but he refused to profane their lofty asylum. 
So he sits, looking out from his watch upon sunshine 
and rain, upon hot calm and wild storm, with the 
whole Peloponnesus extended beneath his eyes. He 
sees from afar the works and ways of men, and the 
world that he has left for ever. Is it not strange that 
still upon the same height men offer to God these 
human sacrifices, changed indeed in form, but in real 
substance the same ? 

The main excursion from the monastery is over 
the saddle of the mountain westward, and through the 
'Laconian gate' down into the valley beneath, to see 
the remains of Epaminondas's great foundation, the 
new Messene. There are still faint traces of a small 
theatre and some other buildings, but of the walls and 
gates enough to tell us pretty clearly how men built 
fortifications in those days. The circuit of the walls 
included the fort on the summit, and enclosed a large 
tract of country, so much that it would be impossible 
for any garrison to defend it, and accordingly we hear 
of the city being taken by sudden assault more than 
once. The plan is very splendid, but seems to us 
rather ostentatious than serious for a new foundation 
liable to attacks from Sparta. The walls were, how- 
ever, beautifully built, with towers at intervals, and 
gates for sallies. The best extant gate is called the 
Arcadian, and consisted of an outer and inner pair of 



372 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

folding doors, enclosing a large round chamber for 
the watch. The size of the doorposts and lintels is 
gigantic, and shows that there was neither time nor 
labour spared to make Messene a statelv settlement. 
There was almost enough land enclosed within the 
walls to feed the inhabitants of the houses, for their 
number never became very great. If Megalopolis, a 
far more successful foundation, was far too large for 
its population, how much more must this have been 
the case with Messene ? In military architecture, 
however, we have no other specimen of old Hellenic 
work equal to it, except perhaps Eleutherae, which 
resembles it in style strongly, though the enclosure is 
quite small in comparison. 

We could have gone up from Messene by a very 
long day's ride to Bassae, and so to Olympia, but we 
had had enough of riding and preferred to make a 
short day to the sea at Kyparissia, and thence by 
steamer to Katakolo, from which rail and road to 
Olympia are quite easv. So we left the convent in 
the morning and descended into the valley, to turn 
north and then north-east, along the river -courses 
which mark the mule-tracks through the wild country. 
We crossed a strange bridge over the junction of two 
rivers made of three arches meeting in the centre, and 
of which the substructures were certainly old Greek 
building. We then passed through bleak tracts of 
uncultivated land, perhaps the most signal case of 
insufficient population we had seen in Greece. All 
these waste fields were covered with great masses of 
asphodel, through which rare herds of swine were 
feeding, and the sight of these fields first suggested 
to me that by the c meadow of asphodel ' in Homer 
is not meant a pleasant garden, or desirable country, 
but merelv a dull waste in which there is nothing 
done, and no sign of human labour or human happi- 



xiv MESSENE 373 

ness. Had there been night or gloom over this stony- 
tract, with its tall straggling plants and pale flowers, 
one could easily imagine it the place which the dead 
hero inhabited when he told his friend that the vilest 
menial on earth was happier than he. 

After some hours the mountains began to approach 
on either side, and we reached a country wonderful in 
its contrast. Great green slopes reached up from us 
far away into the hills, studded with great single forest 
trees, and among them huge shrubs of arbutus and 
mastich, trimmed and rounded as if for ornament. It 
was like a splendid park, kept by an English magnate. 
The regularity of shape in the shrubs arises, no doubt, 
from the constant cropping of the young shoots all 
round by herds of goats, which we met here and there 
in this beautiful solitude. The river bank where we 
rode was clothed with oleander, prickly pear, and other 
flowering shrubs which I could not name. 

At last woods of ancient olives, with great gnarled 
stems, told us that we were nearing some important 
settlement, and the pleasant town of Kyparissia came 
in view — now, alas ! a heap of ruins since the recent 
earthquake. Here we took leave of our ponies, mules, 
and human followers ; but the pathos of parting with 
these intimate companions of many days was some- 
what marred by the divergence of their notions and 
ours as to their pay. Yet these differences, when 
settled, did not prevent them from giving us an 
affectionate farewell. 



CHAPTER XV 



MYCEN^ffi AND TIRYNS 



It is impossible to approach Mycenae from any side 
without being struck with the picturesqueness of the 
site. If you come down over the mountains from 
Corinth, as soon as you reach the head of the valley 
of the Inachus, which is the plain of Argos, you turn 
aside to the left, or east, into a secluded corner — c a 
recess of the horse-feeding Argos,' as Homer calls it, 
and then you find on the edge of the valley, and where 
the hills begin to rise one behind the other, the village 
of Charvati. When you ascend from this place, you 
find that the lofty Mount Elias is separated from the 
plain by two nearly parallel waves of land, which are 
indeed joined at the northern end by a curving saddle, 
but elsewhere are divided by deep gorges. The loftier 
and shorter wave forms the rocky citadel of Mycenae 
— the Argion, as it was once called. The lower and 
longer was part of the outer city, which occupied both 
this hill and the gorge under the Argion. As you 
walk along the lower hill, you find the Treasure-house 
of Atreus, as it is called, built into the side which 
faces the Acropolis. But there are other ruined 
treasuries on the outer slope, and one is just at the 
joining saddle, where the way winds round to lead 
you up the greater hill to the giant gate with the 
Lion portal. If we represent the high levels under the 

374 



chap, xv MYCENiE 375 

image of a fishing-hook, with the shank placed down- 
wards (south), and the point lying to the right (east), 
then the Great Treasury is at that spot in the shank 
which is exactly opposite the point, and faces it. The 
point and barb are the Acropolis. The New Treasury 
is just at the turn of the hook, facing inwards (to the 
south). This will give a rough idea of the site. It 
is not necessary to enter into details, when so many 
maps and plans are now in circulation. But I would 
especially refer to the admirable illustrations in Schlie- 
mann's Mycena, where all these matters are made 
perfectly plain and easy. 

When we first visited the place, it was in the after- 
noon of a splendid summer's day ; the fields were 
yellow and white with stubbles or with dust, and the 
deep grey shadow of a passing cloud was the only 
variety in the colour of the upper plain. For here 
there are now no trees, the corn had been reaped, 
and the land asserted its character as very thirsty 
Argos. But as we ascended to higher ground, the 
groves and plantations of the lower plain came in 
sight, the splendid blue of the bay began to frame 
the picture, and the setting sun cast deeper shadow 
and richer colour over all the view. Down at the 
river-bed great oleanders were spreading their sheets 
of bloom, like the rhododendrons in our climate, 
but they were too distant to form a feature in the 
prospect, 

I saw the valley of Argos again in spring, in our 
c roaring moon of daffodil and crocus ' ; it was the 
time of growing corn, of scarlet anemone and purple 
cistus, but there too of high winds and glancing 
shadows. Then all the plain was either brilliant 
green with growing wheat, or ruddy brown with 
recent tillage ; there were clouds about the moun- 
tains, and changing colours in the sky, and a feeling 



376 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

of freshness and life, very different from the golden 
haze and dreamy calmness of a southern June. 

I can hardly say which of these seasons was the 
more beautiful, but I shall always associate the summer 
scene with the charm of a first visit to this famous 
spot, and still more with the venerable and undisturbed 
aspect of the ruins before they had been profaned by 
modern research. It is, I suppose, ungrateful to 
complain of these things, and we must admit that 
great discoveries outbalance the aesthetic damage done 
to an ancient ruin by digging unsightly holes and 
piling mounds of earth about it ; but who can con- 
template without sorrow the covering of the finest 
piece of the Cyclopean wall at Mycenae with the 
rubbish taken away from over the tombs ? Who will 
not regret the fig-tree which spread its shade over the 
portal of the House of Atreus ? This fig-tree is still 
to be seen in the older photographs, and is in the 
woodcut of the entrance given in Dr. Schliemann's 
book, but the visitor of to-day will look for it in vain. 
On the other hand, the opening at the top, which had 
been there since the beginning of last century, but 
which was closed when I first visited the chamber, 
had been again uncovered, and so it was much easier 
to examine the inner arrangement of the building. 

I am not sure that this wonderful structure was 
visited or described by any traveller from the days of 
Pausanias till after the year 1800. At least I can find 
no description from any former traveller quoted in the 
manv accurate accounts which the nineteenth century 
produced. Chandler, in 1776, intended to visit 
Mvcenas, but accidentally missed the spot on his way 
from Argos to Corinth — a thing more likely to happen 
then, when there was a good deal of wooding in the 
upper part of the plain. But Clarke, Dodwell, and 
Gell all visited and described the place between 1 800 



xv THE TREASURY OF ATREUS 377 

and 1806, and the latter two published accurate draw- 
ings of both the portal and the inner view, which was 
possible, owing to the aperture made at the summit. 

About the same time, Lord Elgin had turned his 
attention to the Treasury, and had made excavations 
about the place, finding several fragments of very old 
engraved basalt and limestone, which had been em- 
ployed to ornament the entrance. Some of these 
fragments are now in the British Museum, and large 
pieces of the fluted pillars flanking the doorway have 
recently come there from the Marquis of Sligo's seat 
near Westport, whither they had been brought in 
the Marquis's yacht nearly one hundred years ago. 
Hence a fine restoration of the gate has become 
possible and is to be seen at the Museum. But, 
though both Clarke and Leake allude to c Lord 
Elgin's excavations,' they do not specify what was 
performed, or in what condition the place had been 
before their researches. There is no published account 
of this interesting point, which is probably to be 
solved by the still unpublished journals said to be in 
the possession of the present Earl. 1 This much is, 
however, certain, that the chamber was not first 
entered at this time ; for Dr. Clarke speaks of its 
appearance as that of a place open for centuries. We 
know that systematic rifling of ancient tombs took 
place at the close of the classical epoch ; 2 we can 
imagine it repeated in every age of disorder or bar- 
barism ; and the accounts we hear of the Genoese 
plundering the great mounds of the Crimea show that 
even these civilised and artistic Italians thought it no 
desecration to obtain gold and jewels from un-named, 

1 I have made special inquiries for these, but without any result. 
They seem to be lost. 

2 Cf. p. 319, and the outrages of the Galatian mercenaries under 
Philip V. of Macedon, told by Polybius. 



378 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

long- forgotten sepulchres. It seems, therefore, im- 
possible to say at what epoch — probably even before 
Pausanias — this chamber was opened. The story in 
Dr. Schliemann's book, 1 which he quotes from a Greek 
newspaper, and which attributes the plundering of it 
to Veli Pashi, in 1810, is positively groundless, and in 
direct contradiction to the irrefragable evidence I have 
above adduced. The Pasha may have probed the 
now ruined chambers on the outer side of the hill - 9 
but the account of what he found is so mythical that the 
whole story may be rejected as undeserving of credit. 

I need not attempt a fresh description of the Great 
Tomb, in the face of such ample and accurate reports 
as those I have indicated. It is in no sense a rude 
building, or one of a helpless and barbarous age, but, 
on the contrary, the product of enormous appliances, 
and of a perfect knowledge of all the mechanical 
requirements for any building, if we except the 
application of the arch. The stones are hewn square, 
or curved to form the circular dome within, with 
admirable exactness. Above the enormous lintel- 
stone, nearly twenty -seven feet long, and which is 
doubly grooved, by way of ornament, all along its 
edge over the doorway, there is now a triangular 
window or relieving aperture, which was certainly 
filled with some artistic carving like the analogous 
space over the lintel in the gate of the Acropolis. 
Shortly after Lord Elgin had cleared the entrance, 
Gell and Dodwell found various pieces of green and 
red marble carved with geometrical patterns, some of 
which are reproduced in Dodwell's book. Gell also 
found some fragments in a neighbouring chapel, and 
others are said to be built into a wall at Nauplia. 
There were thin columns standing on each side in 
front of the gate, with some ornament surmounting 

1 Mycena, p. 49. 



xv THE TREASURY OF ATREUS 379 

them. There is the strongest architectural reason for 
the triangular aperture over the door, as it diminishes 
the enormous weight to be borne by the lintel j and 
here, no doubt, some ornament very like the lions on 
the citadel gate may have been applied. 

The outer lintel -stone is not by any means the 
largest, but is far exceeded by the inner, which lies 
next to it, and which reaches on each side of the 
entrance a long way round the chamber, its inner 
surface being curved to suit the form of the wall. 
Along this curve it is twenty-nine feet long ; it is, 
moreover, seventeen feet broad, and nearly four feet 
thick, weighing about one hundred and twenty-four 
tons ! 

When we first entered by the light of torches, we 
found ourselves in the great cone-shaped chamber, 
which, strange to say, reminded me of the Pantheon 
at Rome more than any other building I know, and is, 
nevertheless, built on a very different principle. 1 The 
stones are not, indeed, pushed forward one above the 
other, as in ruder stone roofs through Ireland ; but 
each of them, which is on the other surfaces cut 
perfectly square, has its inner face curved so that the 
upper end comes out several inches above the lower. 
So each stone carries on the conical plan, having its 
lower line fitting closely to the upper line of the one 
beneath, and the whole dome ends with a great flat 
stone laid on the top. 2 

1 According to J. H. Middleton the Pantheon is not an arch, as used 
to be assumed, but a great concrete cap fitted on to a frame of wood- 
work, which was then removed. 

2 According to Pausanias the treasury of Minyae was differently 
built ; for the top stone of its flat dome was the keystone (ap/xovta) of 
the whole. This is not true. The stone roofs in Ireland seem to me 
far more curious in construction, for two reasons : first, because the 
stones used are so very small ; and, secondly, because there can be, of 
course, no pressure on a roof like the pressure brought to bear on a 
•ubterranean chamber from above. 



380 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Dodwell still found copper nails of some inches 
in length, which he supposed to have been used to 
fasten on thin plates of shining metal j but I was at 
first unable to see even the holes in the roof, which 
other travellers had believed to be the places where the 
nails were inserted. However, without being provided 
with magnesium wire, it was then impossible to light 
the chamber sufficiently for a positive decision on this 
point. A comparatively small side chamber is hollowed 
out in the rock and earth, without any stone casing 
or ornament whatever, but with a similar triangular 
aperture over its doorway. Schliemann tells us he 
dug two trenches in this chamber, and that, besides 
finding some hewn pieces of limestone, he found in 
the middle a circular depression (apparently of stone), 
twenty -one inches deep, and about one yard in 
diameter, which he compares to a large wash-bowl. 
Any one who has visited New Grange will be struck 
with the likeness of this description to the large stone 
saucers which are still to be seen there, and of which 
I shall speak presently. 

There has been much controversy about the use to 
which this building was applied, and we cannot now 
attempt to change the name, even if we could prove 
its absurdity. Pausanias, who saw Mycenae in the 
second century a.d., found it in much the same state 
as we do, and was no better informed than we, though 
he tells us the popular belief that this and its fellows 
were treasure-houses like that of the Minyae at 
Orchomenus, which was very much greater, and was, 
in his opinion, one of the most wonderful things in all 
Greece. 

It is now accepted that it is a tomb. In the first 
place, there are three other similar buildings quite 
close to it, which Pausanias mentions as the treasure- 
houses of the sons of Atreus, but their number makes 



xv THE TREASURY OF ATREUS 381 

it most unlikely that any of them could be for treasure. 
In the next place, these buildings were all underground 
and dark, and exactly such as would be selected for tombs. 
Thirdly, they are not situated within the enclosure of 
the citadel of Mycenae, but are outside it, and probably 
outside the original town altogether — a thing quite 
inconceivable if they were meant for treasure, but 
most reasonable, and according to analogy, if they 
were used as tombs. This, too, would of course 
explain the plurality of them — different kings having 
built them, just like the pyramids of Chufu, Safra, and 
Menkerah, and many others, along the plain of 
Memphis in Egypt. It is even quite easy and natural 
to explain on this hypothesis how they came to be 
thought treasure-houses. It is known that the 
sepulchral tumuli of similar construction in other 
places, and possibly built by kindred people, contained 
much treasure, left there by way of honour to the 
deceased. Herodotus describes this in Scythian tombs, 
some of which have been opened of late, and have 
verified his assertions. 1 The lavish expense at 
Patroclus's funeral, in the 77/W, shows the prevalence 
of similar notions among early Greeks, who held, 
down to iEschylus's day, that the importance of a 
man among the dead was in proportion to the cir- 
cumstance with which his tomb was treated by the 
living. It may, therefore, be assumed as certain that 
these strongholds of the dead were filled with many 
precious things in gold and other metals, intended as 
parting gifts in honour of the king who was laid to 
rest. Long after the devastation of Mycenae, I sup- 
pose that these tombs were opened in search of treasure, 
and not in vain ; and so nothing was said about the 
skeleton tenant, while rumours went abroad of the 
rich treasure-trove within the giant portal. Thus, 

1 Cf. Macpherson'8 Antiquities of Kertch. 



382 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

then, the tradition would spring up and grow, that 
the building was the treasure-house of some old 
legendary king. I 

These considerations have led us away from the 
actual survey of the old vault, for ruin it cannot be 
called. The simplicity and massiveness of its structure 
have defied age and violence, and, except for the 
shattered ornaments, and a few pieces over the inner 
side of the window, not a stone appears ever to have 
been moved from its place. Standing at the entrance, 
you look out upon the scattered masonry of the walls 
of Mycenae, on the hillock over against you. Close 
beyond this is a dark and solemn chain of mountains. 
The view is narrow and confined, and faces the north, 
so that, for most of the day, the gate is dark and in 
shadow. We can conceive no fitter place for the 
burial of a king, within sight of his citadel, in the 
heart of a deep natural hillock, with a great solemn 
portal symbolising the resistless strength of the barrier 
which he had passed into an unknown land. But one 
more remark seems necessary. This treasure-house is 
by no means a Hellenic building in its features. It 
has the same perfection of construction which can be 
seen at Eleutherae, or any other Greek fort, but still 
the really analogous buildings are to be found in far 
distant lands — in the raths of Ireland and the barrows 
of the Crimea. 

I have had the opportunity of comparing the 
structure and effect of the great sepulchral monu- 
ments in the county of Meath, in Ireland. Two of 
these, Dowth and New Grange, are opened, and can 
be entered almost as easily as the treasury of Atreus. 
They lie close to the rich valley of the Boyne, in that 
part of the country which was pointed out by nature 
as the earliest seat of wealth and culture. Dowth is 
the ruder and less ornamented, and therefore not 



xv GREEK AND IRISH TOMBS 383 

improbably the older, but is less suited for the present 
comparison than the greater and more ornate New 
Grange. 

This splendid tomb is not a whit less remarkable, 
or less colossal in its construction, than those at 
Mycenae, but differs in many details. It was not 
hollowed out in a hillside, but was built of great 
upright stones, with flat slabs laid over them, and 
then covered with a mountain of earth. An enor- 
mous circle of giant boulders stands round the foot 
of the mound. Instead of passing along an open 
dromos into a great vaulted chamber, there is a long 
narrow covered corridor, which leads to a much 
smaller, but still very lofty room, nearly twenty feet 
high. Three recesses in the walls of this latter each 
contain a large round saucer, so to speak, made of a 
single stone, in which the remains of the dead seem 
to have been laid. The saucer is very shallow, and 
not more than four feet in diameter. The great 
stones with which the chamber and passage are con- 
structed are not hewn or shaped, and so far the build- 
ing is rather comparable with that of Tiryns than of 
Mycenae. But all over the faces of the stones are 
endless spiral and zigzag ornaments, even covering 
built-in surfaces, and thus invisible, so that this 
decoration must have been applied to the slabs prior 
to the building. On the outside stones, both under 
and over the entry, there is a well-executed carving of 
more finished geometrical designs. 

Putting aside minor details, it may be said that 
while both monuments show an equal display of 
human strength, and an equal contempt for human 
toil, which were lavished upon them without stint, 
the Greek building shows far greater finish of design 
and neatness of execution, together with greater 
simplicity. The stones are all carefully hewn and 



384 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

fitted, but not carved or decorated. The triangular 
carved block over the lintel, and the supposed metal 
plates on the interior, were both foreign to the 
original structure. On the contrary, while the Irish 
tomb is a far greater feature in the landscape — a land- 
mark in the district — the great stones within are not 
fitted together, or hewn into shape, and yet they are 
covered with patterns and designs strangely similar to 
the carvings found by Dodwell and Dr. Schliemann 
at the Argive tombs. Thus the Irish builders, with 
far greater rudeness, show a greater taste for orna- 
ment. They care less for design and symmetry — 
more for beauty of detail. The Greek essay naturally 
culminates in the severe symmetry of the Doric 
Temple — the Irish in the glorious intricacy of the 
Book of Kells. 

The second treasury excavated by Mrs. Schliemann 
has been disappointing in its results. Though it 
seems not to have been disturbed for ages, it had 
evidently been once rifled, for nothing save a few 
fragments of pottery were found within. Its entrance 
is much loftier than that of the House of Atreus, but 
the general building is inferior, the stones are far 
smaller, and by no means so well fitted, and it pro- 
duces altogether the impression of being either a much 
earlier and ruder attempt, or a poor and feeble imita- 
tion. Though Dr. Schliemann asserts the former, I 
am disposed to suspect the latter to be the case. 

A great deal of what was said about the tomb 
of Agamemnon, as the common people, with truer 
instinct, call the supposed treasure-house, may be 
repeated about the fortifications of Mycenae. It is 
the work of builders who know perfectly how to deal 
with their materials — who can hew and fit great 
blocks of stone with perfect ease ; nay, who prefer, 
for the sake of massive effect, to make their doorway 



xv THE LION GATE 385 

with such enormous blocks as even modern science 
would find it difficult to handle. The sculp- 
ture over the gate fortunately remains almost entire. 
Two lions, standing up at a small pillar, were looking 
out fiercely at the stranger. The heads are gone, 
having probably, as Dr. Schliemann first observed, 
been made of bronze, and riveted to the stone. The 
rest of the sculpture is intact, and is of a strangely 
heraldic character. 1 It is a piece of bluish lime- 
stone, 2 which must have been brought from a long 
distance, quite different from the rough breccia of the 
rest of the gate. The lintel-stone is not nearly so 
vast as that of the treasure-house : it is only fifteen 
feet long, but is somewhat thicker, and also much 
deeper, going back the full depth of the gateway. 
Still, it must weigh a good many tons ; and it 
puzzles us to think how it can have been put into its 
place with the appliances then in vogue. The joint 
use of square and polygonal masonry is very curious. 
Standing within the gate, one side is of square-hewn 
stones, the other of irregular, though well- fitted, 
blocks. On the left side, looking into the gate, 
there is a gap of one block in the wall, which looks 

1 Similar heraldic designs on seals, etc., have recently been found in 
Babylonia, and lead us to infer that the design came thence through 
Phoenician commerce. But the heraldic facing of two opposed animals 
is also usual in the ornamentation of the Solomon Islanders, so that 
it may be a device common to many races, and not spread by mere 
borrowing. 

a There has been strange diversity of opinion about the nature of this 
•tone. Dodwell and Leake call it basalt. Moreover, Dodwell thought 
it greenish. Some one else thinks it yellowish. The French expedi- 
tion and Curtius call it limestone. Dr. Schliemann says it is the same 
breccia as the rest of the gate. It is in the face of these opinions that I 
persist in the statement that it is bluish, and limestone. 

It is owing to this note that it was again critically examined by Mr. 
Tuckett, who published his result in the Architect of 19th January 1879, 
and who had fragments of the stone analysed, which justified my obser- 
vation. He also notes that several observers erred as to the shape of 
the central pillar, which does not diminish in bulk downwards. 

2 C 



386 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

very like a window, 1 as it is no: probable that a single 
stone was taken, or fell out of its place afterwards, 
without disturbing the rest. What makes it, perhacs. 
more possible that this window is intentional, is the 

position of the rare, which is no: in the middle 
c: tne waLed causeway, as you enter, bu: to :ne rirht 
side, 

ten you go in, and ciimb up the hill of the 
Acr:p:_is, you r.r.i various other portions of Cyclopean 
walls which belonged to the old palace, in plan very 
similar to that of Tirvns. Bu: the outer wail 2;oes 
all round the hill where it is steepest, sometimes ri^ht 
along a precipice, and even-where orrerinj an almost 
unsurmountable obstacle to an ancient assailant. On 
the east sice, facing the steep mountain, which is 
separated from it bv a deep gorge, is a postern gate, 
consisting merely of three stones, but these so massive, 
and so beau:ifullv hewn and fitted, as to be a struc- 
ture hardly less striking than the lion sate. At about 
half the depth of these huge blocks there is a regular 
groove cut down both sices and along the top, in 
order to hold the door. 

Tne whole summit of the great rock is now stony 
and bare, but not so bare that I could not gather 
scarlet anemones, which found scantv sustenance here 
and there in tiny patches of grass, and gladdened the 
grey colour of the native rock and the primeval walls. 
The view from the summit, when first I saw it, was 
one of singular solitude and peace ; not a stone seemed 
to have been disturbed for ages ; not a human crea- 
ture, or even a browsing goat, was visible, and the 
traveller might sketch or scrutinise any part of the 

1 This is Schliemann's opinion also. He was the first to show 
that along the entrance-wall the fine building with square blocks was 
only a facing laid on irregular building with small stones. This points 

clearly :; two •-zzai\z iizsa iz. the work. 



xv SCHLIEMANN'S EXCAVATIONS 387 

fortress without fear of intrusion, far less of molesta- 
tion. When I again reached the site a great change 
had taken place. Dr. Schliemann had attacked the 
ruins, and had made his world-renowned excavations 
inside and about the lion gate. To the gate itself 
this was a very great gain. All the encumbering 
earth and stones have been removed, so that we can 
now admire the full proportions of the mighty portal. 
He discovered a tiny porter's lodge inside it. He 
denied the existence of the wheel-tracks which we and 
others fancied we had seen there on our former visit. 

But proceeding from the gate to the other side, 
where the hill slopes down rapidly, and where the great 
irregular Cyclopean wall trends away to the right, 
Dr. Schliemann found a deep accumulation of soil. 
This was, of course, the .chief place on an otherwise 
bare rock where excavations promised large results. 
And the result was beyond the wildest anticipations. 
The whole account of what he has done is long 
before the public in his very splendid book, of which 
the illustrations are quite an epoch in the history of 
ornament, and in spite of their great antiquity suggest 
to our modern jewellers many an exquisite pattern. 
The sum of what he found is this : — 

He first found in this area a double circle of thin 
upright slabs, joined together closely, and joined across 
the top with flat slabs morticed into them, the whole 
circuit being like a covered way, about three feet 
high. Into the enclosed circle a way leads from the 
lion gate ; and what I noted particularly was this, 
that the whole circle, which was over thirty yards 
in diameter, was separated from the higher ground 
by a very miserable bounding wall, which, though 
quite concealed before the excavations, and therefore 
certainly very old, looked for all the world like some 
Turkish piece of masonry. 



388 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

As soon as this stone circle was discovered, it was 
suggested that old Greek agoras were found, that 
they were often in the citadel at the king's gate, and 
that people were sometimes buried in them. Dr. 
Schliemann at once baptized the place as the agora 
of Mycenae. It was a circle with only one free 
access, and that from the gate j it had tombstones 
standing in the midst of it, and there were the charred 
remains of sacrifices about them. The number of 
bodies already exhumed beneath precluded their being 
all founders or heroes of the city. These and other 
indications were enough to disprove clearly that the 
circle was an agora, but that it was rather a place of 
sepulture, enclosed, as such places always were, with 
a fence, which seems made in imitation of a palisade 
of wood. 

Inside this circuit of stone slabs were found- 
apparently at the same depth, but on this Dr. Schlie- 
mann is not explicit — very curious and very archaic 
carved slabs, with rude hunting scenes of warriors in 
very uncomfortable chariots, and varied spiral orna- 
ments filling up the vacant spaces. These sculptures 
are unlike any Hellenic work, properly so called, and 
point back to a very remote period, and probably to 
the introduction of a foreign art among the rude in- 
habitants of early Greece. Deeper down were found 
more tombstones, all manner of archaic pottery, arrow- 
heads, and buttons of bone ; there were also found 
some rude construction of hewn stones, which may 
have served as an altar or a tomb. 

Yet farther down, twenty-one feet deep, and close 
to the rock, were lying together a number of skeletons, 
which seemed to have been hastily or carelessly buried j 
but in the rock itself, in rudely hewn chambers, were 
found fifteen bodies buried with a splendour seldom 
equalled in the history of the world. These people 



xv THE TOMBS 389 

were not buried like Greeks. They were not laid in 
rock chambers, like the Scythian kings. They were 
sunk in graves under the earth, which were large 
enough to receive them, had they not been filled up 
round the bottom with rudely built walls, or pieces of 
stone, so as to reduce the area, but to create perhaps 
some ventilation for the fire which had partly burnt 
the bodies where they were found. 1 Thus the 
splendidly attired and jewelled corpses, some of them 
with masks and breastplates of gold, were, so to speak, 
jammed down by the earth and stones above them 
into a very narrow space ; but there appears to have 
been some arrangement for protecting them and their 
treasure from complete confusion with the soil which 
settled down over them. This, if the account of. the 
excavation be accurate, seems the most peculiar feature 
in the burial of these great personages, but finds a 
parallel in the curious tombs of Hallstadt, which 
afford many analogies to Mycenae. 2 

Dr. Schliemann boldly announced in the Times^ 
and the public believed him, that he had found 
Agamemnon and his companions, who were murdered 
when they returned from the siege of Troy. The 
burial is indeed quite different from any such ceremony 
described in the Homeric poems. The number of 
fifteen is not to be accounted for by any of the legends. 
There is no reason to think all the tombs have been dis- 
covered ; one, or at least part of the treasure belonging 

1 This fact is now contested, and it is said that the black vestiges of 
wood are mainly those of wooden supports set up to protect the bodies 
from falling stones. According to Dr. Dbrpfeld, even buried bodies 
were generally partially burnt first, and this may offer the true 
solution. 

2 These analogies are brought out by Mr. A. S. Murray, in the 
Academy, No. 29. Cf. also Dorpfeld in Schuchhardt, p. 161. Many of 
the gold ornaments are so thin that they must have been sham orna- 
ments intended to satisfy the dead, while the living retained the heavier 
originals. 



390 RAMBLES IX GREECE chap. 

:o it, was since found outside the circle. Another 
was afterwards found bv ]\L Stamatakes. iEschvlus, 
our oldest and best authority, places the tomb or 
Agamemnon, not at Mycenae, but at Argcs. They 
all agree that he was buried with contempt and dis- 
honour. The result was that when the public came 
to hear the Agamemnon theory disproved, it was dis- 
posed to take another leap in the dark, and to look 
upon the whole discovery as suspicious, and as possibly 
something mediaeval, 

Such an inference would be as absurd as to accept 
the hypothesis of Dr. ScMemir.n. The tomb? are 
undoubtedly verv ancient, certainly far more ancient 
than the supposed date of Homer, or even of Aga- 
memnon. The treasures which have been carried to 
Athens, and which I not only saw but handled, are 
reallv valuable masses of gold, with a good deal of 
beauty of workmanship, both in design and decoration. 
Though the masks are verv uglv and barbarous, and 
though there is in general no power shown of mould- 
ing any animal figure, there are verv beautiful cups 
and jugs, there are most elegant geometrical ornaments 
— zigzags, spirals, and the like — and there are even 
imitations of animals of much artistic merit. The 
celebrated silver bull's head, with golden horns, is a 
piece of work which would not disgrace a goidsmith 
of our own dav ; and this mav be said of many of the 
ornaments. Any one who knows the Irish gold 
ornaments of the Academv Museum in Dublin per- 
ceives a wonderful family likeness in the old Irish 
spirals and decorations, vet not more than might 
occur among kindred nations working with the same 
materials under similar conditions. But I feel con- 
vinced that the best things in the tombs it Mycenae 
were not made bv native artists, but imported, prob- 
ably from Svria and Egypt. This seems proved even 



xv ART IN THE TOMBS 391 

by the various materials which have been employed — 
ivory, alabaster, amber ; x in one case even an ostrich 
egg. So we come back upon the despised legends of 
Cadmus and Danaus, and find that they told us truly 
of an old cultivated race coming from the South and 
the East to humanise the northern progenitors of the 
Greeks. 

I can now add important corroborations of these 
general conclusions from the researches made since the 
appearance of my earlier editions. I then said that 
the discoveries were too fresh and dazzling to admit 
of safe theories concerning their origin. By way of 
illustration I need only allude to those savants (they 
will hereafter be obliged to me for omitting their 
names) who imagined that all the Mycenaean tombs 
were not archaic at all, but the work of some northern 
oarbarians who occupied Greece during the disasters of 
the later Roman Empire ! Serious researches, how- 
ever, have at last brought us considerable light. In the 
first place, Helbig, in an important work, comparing 
the treasures of Mycenae with the allusions to art, arms, 
and manufactures in the Homeric poems, came to the 
negative conclusion that these two civilisations were 
distinct — that the Homeric poets cannot have had 
before them the palace of Mycenae which owned the 
Schliemann treasures. As there is no room in Greek 
history for such a civilisation posterior to the Homeric 
poems, it follows that the latter must describe a 
civilisation considerably later than that we have found 
at Mycenae. Placing the Homeric poems in the 
eighth century B.C., we shall be led to about 1000 B.C. 
as the latest possible date for the splendours of Mycenae. 
This negative conclusion has been well-nigh demon- 

1 Baltic amber may possibly have come in with the northern or Pelasgie 
element of the population, which also supplied many of the spiral design!. 
But more probably the Phoenicians brought it. 



392 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

strated by the positive results of the various recent 
researches in Egypt. Not only has the Egypt 
Exploration Society examined carefully the sites of 
Naucratis and Daphne, thus disclosing to us what 
Greek art and manufacture could produce in the sixth 
and seventh centuries B.C. (665-565 B.C.), but Dr. 
Flinders Petrie has enriched our knowledge by his 
wonderful discoveries of Egyptian art on several sites, 
and of many epochs, fairly determinable by the reigning 
dynasties. He has also examined the Mycenaean and 
other prehistoric treasures collected at Athens by the 
light of his rich Egyptian experience, and has given a 
summary of the results in two short articles in the 
yournal of Hellenic Studies. 

He finds that the materials and their treatment, 
such as blue glass (even in its decomposition), alabaster, 
rock-crystal, hollowed and painted within, dome-head 
rivets attaching handles of gold cups, ostrich eggs with 
handles attached, ties made for ornament in porcelain, 
are all to be found in Egyptian tombs varying from 
1400 to 1 1 00 in date. His analysis leads him to give 
the dates for the tombs I.-IV. at Mycenae as 1200- 
11 00 B.C. That an earlier date is improbable is shown 
by the negative evidence that none of the purely 
geometrical false-necked vases occur, such as are the 
general product of 1400-1200 in Egyptian deposits. 
But as several isolated articles are of older types, as in 
particular the lions over the gate are quite similar to a 
gilt wooden lion he found of about 1450 B.C. in date, 
the Mycenaean civilisation probably extended over a 
considerable period. He even finds proof of decadence 
in grave IV. as compared with the rest, and so comes 
to the conclusion, which I am disposed to question, 
that the tombs within the circle at Mycenae (shaft- 
tombs) are later and worse interments made by the 
same, people who had already built the more majestic 



xv ART IN THE TOMBS 393 

and costly bee-hive tombs. Instead, therefore, of 
upholding a Phrygian origin, Dr. Petrie asserts an 
Egyptian origin for both Mycenaean and parallel 
Phrygian designs. The spiral pattern in its various 
forms, the rosettes, the keyfret, the palmetto, are all 
used in very early Egyptian decoration. The inlaid 
daggers of Mycenae have long been recognised as 
inspired by Egypt j c but we must note that it is 
native work and not merely an imported article. The 
attitude of the figures and of the lions, and the form 
of the cat, are such as no Egyptian would have 
executed. To make such things in Greece implies a 
far higher culture than merely to import them. The 
same remark applies to the glazed pottery ; the style 
of some is not Egyptian, so that here the Mycenaeans 
were capable of elaborate technical work, and imitated 
rather than imported from Egypt. . . . The familiarity 
with Egypt is further proved by the lotus pattern on 
the dagger blade, by the cat on the dagger, and the 
cats on the gold-foil ornaments, since the cat was then 
unknown in Greece. That the general range of the 
civilisation was that of Africa is indicated by the 
frequent use of the palm (not then known in Greece) 
as a decoration, and by the very scanty clothing of the 
male figures, indicating that dress was not a necessity 
of climate. On the other hand this culture reached 
out to the north of Europe. The silver-headed rein- 
deer or elk, found in grave IV., can only be the result 
of northern intercourse. The amber so commonly 
used comes from the Baltic. And we see in Celtic 
ornament the obvious reproduction of the decorations 
of Mycenae, as Mr. Arthur Evans has shown. Not 
only is the spiral decoration indistinguishable, 1 but 

1 This is not true of Irish designs, which I compared carefully with 
the Mycenaean, and failed to find any identity, though many close 
resemblances. 



394 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

also the taste for elaborately embossed diadems and 

j 

breastplates of gold is peculiar to the Mycenaean and 
Celtic cultures. The great period of Mvcenae seems 
therefore to date 1300-1103 B.C., with occasional 
traditional links with Egvpt as far back as 1500 or 
1600 B.C.' 

Such is an abstract of Dr. Petrie's estimate. 1 
I will only here point out, in addition, the re- 
markable unity of stvle between the ornaments found 
at a depth of twenty-five feet in the tombs, the 
sculptured tombstones twelve or fourteen feet over 
them, and the lions on the gate of the citadel. It is 
indeed onlv a general uniformity, but it corroborates 
Dr. Petrie's inference that there was more than mere 
importing, there was home manufacture. It seems, 
then, that the art of Mycenae had not changed when 
its earlv history came to a close, and its inhabitants 
were forced to abandon the fortress and submit to the 
now Doric Argos. 

We are, indeed, told expressly bv Pausanias and 
Diodorus that this event did not take place till after 
the Persian wars, when old Hellenic art was already 
well defined, and was beginning to make rapid 
progress. But this express statement, which I saw 
reason to question since mv former remarks on the 
subiect in this book, I am now determined to reject, 
in the face of the inconsistencies of these historians, 
the silence of all the contemporaries of the alleged 
conquest, and the exclusively archaic remains which 
Dr. Schliemann has unearthed. Mvcenae, along with 
Tirvns, Midea, and the other towns of the plain, was 
incorporated into Argos at a far earlier date, and not 
posterior to the brilliant rule of Pheidon. So it comes 
that historical Greece is silent about the ancient 

1 It agrees with that of Schuchhardt (in Scklitmuam's Excai-atbm, 
189 1), and of Busolt in the second edition of his Greek history, 1892. 



xv EARLY RUIN OF MYCENiE 395 

capital of the Pelopids, and the poets transfer all its 
glories to Argos. Once, indeed, the name did appear 
on the national records. The offerings to the gods 
at Olympia, and at Delphi, after the victory over the 
Persians, recorded that a few patriots — 460 in all — 
from Mycenae and from Tiryns had joined the Greeks 
at Plataea, while the remainder of the Argives 
preserved a base and cowardly neutrality. The 
Mycenaeans were very few in number ; sixty are 
mentioned in connection with Thermopylae by 
Herodotus. They were probably exiles through 
Greece, who had preserved their traditions and their 
descent, and gloried in exposing and insulting Argive 
Medism. How completely Mycenae had then dis- 
appeared appears clearly from the fact that the 
patriotic iEschylus, the fellow-soldier of these exiles 
in the Persian War, never mentions Mycence in con- 
nection with Agamemnon ! The Tirynthian 400 
may even have been the remnant of the slave popula- 
tion, which Herodotus tells us seized the citadel of 
Tiryns, when driven out from Argos twenty years 
before, and who lived there for some years. In the 
crisis of Plataea the Greeks were not dainty or 
critical, and they may have readily conceded the title 
of Tirynthian to these doubtful citizens, out of 
hatred and disgust at the neutrality of Argos. 
However these things may be, the mention of 
Mycenaeans and Tirynthians on this solitary occasion 
afforded an obvious warrant to Diodorus for his date 
(466 B.C.) of the destruction of Mycenae. But I am 
convinced that his authority, and that of Pausanias, 
who follows him, must be deliberately rejected. 

On the other hand, the origin of Mycenae, and its 
greatness as a royal residence, must be thrown back 
into a far deeper antiquity than any one had yet 
imagined. If Agamemnon and his house represent 



396 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Hellenic princes, of the type of Homer's knowledge 
and acquaintance, they must have arisen after some 
older, and apparently different dynasties had ruled and 
had buried their dead at Mycenae. 1 But it is also 
possible that the Homeric bards, describing professedly 
the acts of a past age, imposed their new manners 
and their own culture upon the Pelopids, whom they 
only knew by vague tradition, and that thus their 
drawing is false j while the chiefs they glorify were 
the ancient pre-Hellenic rulers of the country. This 
latter supposition is so shocking a heresy against 
c Homer,' that I will not venture to expand it, and 
will leave the reader to add any conjectures he chooses 
to those which I have already hazarded in too great 
number. 

The further investigation of the remains of Mycenae, 
with the additional evidence derived from the ruins of 
Tiryns, have led Dr. Adler to explain Mycenae as the 
record of a double foundation, first by a race who 
built rubble masonry, and buried their dead in 
narrow rock-tombs or graves, piling on the bodies 
their arms and ornaments ; secondly, after some con- 
siderable interval, by a race who built splendid ashlar 
masonry, with well-cut blocks, and who constructed 
great bee-hive tombs, where the dead could lie with 
ample room in royal state. The second race enlarged, 
rebuilt, and refaced the old fortifications, added the 
present lion gate, and built the so-called treasure- 
houses. For convenience' sake he calls them, accord- 
ing to the old legends, Perseids and Pelopids re- 
spectively. Hence the tombs which Dr. Schliemann 
found were really far older than any one had at first 
supposed, and if the record of Homer points distinctly 
to the Pelopids, then the gold and jewels of a far 

1 This theory of mine, stated in my first edition, is strongly sup- 
ported by Dr. Adler in hi3 preface to Schliemann's Tiryns (1885). 



xv TIRYNS 397 

earlier people were hidden deep underground in the 
foundation of Agamemnon's fortress, merely marked 
by a sacred circle of stones and some archaic grave- 
stones. 

To which of these stages of building do the ruins 
of Tiryns belong ? Apparently to the earlier, though 
here, again, the size of the stones used is far greater 
than those in the first Mycenae, and it is now certain 
that the beginnings of artificial shaping are discernible 
in them. The walls were uncovered and examined 
by Dr. Schliemann, with the valuable advice and 
assistance of Dr. Dorpfeld. I conclude this chapter 
with a brief summary of the results they have 
attained. 

The upper part of the rock of Tiryns, which 
consisted of two plateaus or levels, was known to 
contain remains of building by the shafts which Dr. 
Schliemann had already sunk there in former years. 
But now a very different method of excavating was 
adopted — that of uncovering the surface in layers, so 
that successive strata of debris might be clearly dis- 
tinguished. This exceedingly slow and laborious 
process, which I saw going on for days at Tiryns with 
very little result, brought out in the end the whole 
plan of a palace, with its gates, floors, parting walls, 
and pillar bases, so that in the admirable drawing to 
be seen in the book called Tiryns^ Dr. Dorpfeld has 
given us the first clear view of an old Greek, or 
perhaps even pre-Hellenic palace. The partial agree- 
ment with the plan of the palaces of Troy and of 
Mycenae, since discovered, and the adoption in 
Hellenic temples of the plan of entrance, here several 
times repeated — two pillars between squared pilasters 
(antae) — show that the palace at Tiryns was not ex- 
ceptional, but typical. 

All the gates leading up into this palace are still 



398 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

distinctly marked by the threshold or door-sill, a great 
stone, lying in its place, with grooves inserted for the 
pivots of the doors, which were of wood, but had 
their pivots shod with bronze, as was proved by the 
actual remains. These doors divided a double porch, 
entered either way between two pillars of wood, 
standing upon stone bases still in their place, and 
flanked by antae, which were below of stone and 
above of wood dowelled into the stone piers. All the 
upper structure of the gates, and indeed of all the 
palace, seems to have been of wood. There are clear 
signs of a great conflagration, in which the palace 
perished. This implies the existence of ample fuel, 
and while the ashes, mud-bricks, etc., remain, no 
trace of architrave, or pillar, or roof has been found. 
There are gates of similar design leading into the 
courts and principal chamber of the palace, the floors 
of which are covered with a careful lime concrete 
marked with line patterns, and so sloped as to afford 
easy drainage into a vent leading to pipes of terra- 
cotta, which carried off water. The same careful 
arrangements are observed in the bath-room, with 
a floor of one great stone, twelve feet by nine, which 
is likewise pierced to carry off water. The remains 
of a terra-cotta tub were found there, and the walls 
of the room were panelled with wood, set into the 
raised edge of the floor-stone by dowels sunk in the 
stone. No recent discovery is more interesting than 
this. 

Of the walls little remains but the foundations, 
and here and there a couple of feet of mud-bricks, 
with signs of beams let into them, which added to 
the conflagration. But enough remains to show that 
the walls of the better rooms were richly covered 
with ornament. There is a fresco of a bull still 
preserved, and reproduced in Dr. Schliemann's book j 



xv THE PALACE OF TIRYNS 399 

and there was also found a very remarkable frieze 
ornament in rosettes and brooch patterns, made of 
blue glass paste (supposed to be Homer's kvclvos) and 
alabaster. This valuable relic shows remarkable 
analogies in design to other prehistoric ornaments 
found in Greece. 

The size of the main hall, or men's apartment, is 
very large, the floor covering about 120 square yards, 
and the parallel room in the palace at Troy was 
consequently taken to be the cella of a temple. But 
there seems no doubt that the great room at Tiryns, 
with a hearth in the middle and four pillar bases near 
it, supporting, perhaps, a higher roof, with a clerestory, 
was the main reception-room of the palace ; a smaller 
room of similar construction, not connected with the 
former, save by a circuitous route through passages, 
seems to have been the ladies' drawing-room. 

If I were to attempt any full description of this 
wonderful place I should be obliged to copy out 
a great part of the fifth chapter in Dr. Schliemann's 
book, in which Dr. Dorpfeld has set down very 
modestly, but very completely, the results of his own 
acuteness and research. Many things which are now 
plain enough were perfect riddles till he found the 
true solution, and the acuteness with which he has 
utilised the smallest hints, as well as the caution of 
his conclusions, make this work of his a very model 
of scientific induction. 

He says, rightly enough, that a minute description 
is necessary, because a very few years will cover up 
much of the evidence which he had plainly before 
him. The concrete floors, the remains of mud-brick 
walls, the plan of the various rooms, will be choked 
with grass and weeds, unless they are kept covered 
and cleared. The rain, which has long since washed 



4 oo RAMBLES IN GREECE chap, xv 

all traces of mortar out of the walls, will wash awav 
far more, now that the site is opened, and so the 
future a r chaeologist will find that the book Tiryns will 
tell him much that the actual Tiryns cannot show. 

The lower platform on the rock is not vet touched, 
and here perhaps digging will discover to us the 
remains of a temple, from which one very archaic 
Doric capital and an anteflx have found their way to 
the higher rock. There are traces, too, of the great 
fort being the second building on the site, over an 
older and not vet clearly determined palace. 

Two things are plain from these discoveries, and I 
dwell on them with satisfaction, because they corrobo- 
rate old opinions of mine, put forth long before the 
principal evidence was forthcoming. First, the general 
use of wood for pillars and architraves, so showing how 
naturallv the stone temple imitated the older wooden 
buildings. Secondlv, the archaic or ante- Hellenic 
character of all that was found at Tiryns, with the 
solitary exception of the architectural fragments, 
which certainly have no building to correspond to 
them where they were found. Thus mv hvpothesis, 
which holds that Tiryns, as well as Mycenae, was 
destroved at least as early as Pheidon's time (660 B.C.) 
and not after the Persian wars, receives corroboration 
which will amount to positive proof in any mind open 
to evidence on the point. 



CHAPTER XVI 



MEDIAEVAL GREECE 



When I first went to Greece, forty years ago, the 
few travellers one met in the country never thought 
of studying its mediaeval remains. We were in search 
of classical art, we passed by Byzantine churches or 
Frankish towers with contemptuous ignorance. Mr. 
Finlay's great book, indeed, was already written ; but 
those who knew German, and were bold enough to 
attack the eight volumes which Ersch and Gruber's 
Encyclopedia devote to the article on Greece, had 
been taught by Hopf's Essay on Medieval Greece to 
fathom what depths dulness could attain. Whether 
the author, or the odious paper and type in its double 
columns, contributed to this result, was of little con- 
sequence. The subject itself seemed dreary beyond 
description. All the various peoples who invaded, 
swayed, ravaged, colonised in the Dark Ages, seemed 
but undistinguishable hordes of barbarians, of whom 
we knew nothing, about whom we cared nothing, 
beyond a general hatred of them, as those who had 
broken up and destroyed the splendid temples and fair 
statues that are now the world's desire. Even the 
very thorough and learned scholars who produced 
Baedeker s Greece^ a very few years ago, never thought 
of putting in any information whatever, beyond their 

1 The last edition (1905) presents a very different aspect. 
401 2 D 



402 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

chronological table, upon the many centuries which 
intervened between the close of paganism and the 
recent regeneration of the countrv. The contempt 
for Byzantine work in the East was in our earlv days 
like the contempt of Renaissance work in the West. 
We were all Classical or Gothic in taste. 

Now a great reaction is setting in. Instead of the 
dreadful Hopf, we have the fascinating Gregorovius, 
whose Staat Athen im Mittelalter clothes even dry 
details with the hue of fancv ; we have Sir Rennell 
Rodd's two volumes on Prankish Greece ; the sober 
Murrafs Guide includes Mount Athos and its wonders 
as part of its task. Recent travellers, and the students 
at the Foreign Schools of Athens, tell us of curious 
churches and their frescoes, and now Air. Schultz, of 
the British School, has undertaken to reproduce them 
with his pencil. Following the example of Pullen, 
whose pictures have secured for posterity some record 
of the churches of Salon: ca, so often threatened bv 
fire, he has perpetuated the remnants of an architecture 
and an art which were rapidlv perishing from neglect. 
When I was first at Athens men were seriousiv dis- 
cussing the proprietv of razing to the ground one of 
the most striking of all the Bvzantine churches at 
Athens, because it stood in the thoroughfare which 
led from the palace to the railway station ! Historians 
tell us the dre;. Iful fact, that over seventy of these 
delicately quaint buildings were destroyed when the 
new cathedral, a vulgar compromise in stvle, was 
constructed. A iqw more years of Vandalism in 
Greece, a few more terrible fires at Salonica and at 
Athos, and the world had lost its best records of a 
verv curious and distinctive civilisation. 

There are indeed no mean traces of this art in 
Adriatic Italy ; the exarchate at Ravenna, the eastern 
traffic of Venice, have shown their influence on Italian 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 403 

art and architecture. The splendid mosaics of Ravenna, 
nay, even the seven domes of S. Antonio at Verona, 
the frescoes of the Giotto Chapel at Padua, above all, 
the great cathedral at Venice, are all strongly coloured 
— those of Ravenna even produced — by Byzantine art. 
This marriage of Eastern and Western styles may be 
seen in many beautiful churches in Sicily, in far south 
Italy — Bari, Bitonto, Ruvo, Otranto, and a host oi 
others — also in those beautiful Dalmatian churches at 
Ragusa, Traii, Sebenico, etc., which maintained the 
Romanesque form even into Renaissance days. Yet 
most travellers who visit S. Mark's at Venice have 
never seen a Byzantine church, and do not feel its 
Eastern parentage ; still fewer visit the splendid basilica 
of Parenzo, which is a still more unmistakable example. 
But to those who have turned aside from Olympia 
and Parthenon to study the early Christian remains in 
Greece, all this art of Eastern Italy will acquire a new 
interest and a deeper meaning. 

These are the reasons which have tempted me to 
say a few words on this side of Greek travel. But as 
yet even high authorities are very much in the dark 
about these things. What would a student of Gothic 
architecture say to a discussion whether an extant 
building belonged to the fourth century or the 
eleventh ? and yet such divergent views are still 
maintained concerning the origin of the Athenian 
churches. 

Let us begin with the best and quaintest, the so- 
called Old Cathedral^ which was fortunately allowed 
to stand beside its ugly and pretentious successor. 
The first thing that strikes us is the exceeding small- 
ness of the dimensions, — it is like one of the little 
chapels you find in Glendalough and elsewhere in 
Ireland. I do not know whether the Greeks contem- 
plated a congregation kneeling in the open air, as was 



404 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap 

the case around these chapels in Ireland, but such 
edifices were certainly intended, in the first instance, as 
holy places for sacerdotal celebrations, not as houses 
of prayer for the people. I was told on Mount Athos 
that it was not the practice of the Greek Church to 
celebrate more than one service in any one church 
daily. Hence the monks, who are making prayer 
continually, have a crowd of chapels within the pre- 
cincts of each monastery. Perhaps a similar motive 
may have led to the construction of a great number of 
small churches at Athens, where seventy have already 
been destroyed, and at Salonica, where remains of them 
are still being frequently discovered. Perhaps also 
that desire to consecrate to the religion of Christ the 
hallowed places of the heathen, which turned the 
Parthenon and the temple of Theseus into churches, 
also prompted the Byzantine bishops to set up chapels 
upon smaller heathen sanctuaries, where no stately 
temple existed, and mere consecration would have left 
no patent symbol of Christian occupation. 

But if this Cathedral is small, it has the proper 
beauty of minute art ; it is covered with rich decora- 
tion. All its surfaces show carved fragments not only 
of classical, but of earlier Byzantine work — friezes, 
reliefs, inscriptions, capitals — all so disposed with a 
general correspondence or symmetry as to produce 
the effect of a real design. Moreover, this foreign 
ornament is set in a building strictly Byzantine in 
form, with its rich doorway, its tiny windows with 
their high semicircular arches supported on delicate 
capitals, and toned by the centuries of Attic dust to 
that rich gold-brown which has turned the Parthenon 
from marble almost to ruddy gold. Never was there 
greater harmony and unity attained by the most 
deliberate patch -work. In the earlier works on 
Byzantine art, this church was confidently assigned 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 405 

to the sixth century. Buchon said he found upon it 
the arms of La Roche and of Villehardouin, so that 
he assigned it to the thirteenth. The character of 
the other buildings of these knights makes me doubt 
that they and their friends could have constructed 
such a church — the Western monks then built Latin 
churches in Greece — and I suppose that the arms, for 
which I have searched in vain, were only carved by 
the Franks upon the existing building. But I will 
not therefore subscribe to the sixth-century theory. 

Of the remaining churches three only, the Kapni- 
karea, the Virgin of the Monastery, and S. Theodore, 
are worth studying, as specimens of the typical form 
of such buildings. The main plan is a square, 
surmounted by a cupola supported on four pillars, 
with a corridor or porch on the West side, and three 
polygonal apses on the East. Lesser cupolas often 
surround the central dome. The height and slender- 
ness of this central dome is probably the clearest sign 
of comparative lateness in these buildings, which used 
to be attributed to the fourth and fifth centuries!, but 
are now degraded to the eleventh. The earliest form 
is no doubt that of the massive S. George's at Salonica 
— a huge Rotunda covered with a flat dome, not 
unlike the Pantheon at Rome, with nothing but 
richly ornamented niches, and a splendid mosaic 
ceiling in the dome, to give relief to a very plain 
design. The successive complications and refine- 
ments added to this simple structure may be studied 
even in the later churches of Salonica. 

The traveller who has whetted his taste for this 
peculiar form of mediaeval art, and desires to study it 
further, will find within reach of Athens two monas- 
teries well worth a visit, that of the Phaeneromene on 
Salamis, a very fair specimen of an undisturbed Greek 
monastery, and that of Daphne, which may be ranked 



4 o6 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

with the ruins of Mistra as showing clear traces of 
the conflict of East and West, of Latin with Greek 
Christianity. This sanctuary, with its now decaying 
walls, succeeded as usual to a pagan shrine with 
hardly altered name. The saints, still pictured in 
black and gold upon the walls, and worshipped upon 
their festivals, have become fantastic and unreal 
beings, well enough adapted to that mixture of 
superstition and nationalism which is the body of 
the Greek religion, and, despite a purer creed, not 
very far removed from the religious instincts of the 
old Hellenic race. Five or six wretched monks still 
occupy the dilapidated building, vegetating in sleepy 
idleness ; they do nothing but repeat daily their 
accustomed prayers, and receive dues for allowing 
the people of the neighbouring hamlets to kiss, once 
or twice a year, a dreadful-looking S. Elias, painted 
olive- brown on a gold background, or to light the 
nightly lamp at the wayside shrine of a saint black 
with smoke. 

The structure, as we now see it, is chiefly the work 
of the Cistercians who accompanied Otho de la Roche 
from Champagne to his dukedom of Athens, and was 
established round a far older Byzantine church and 
monastery. Like all mediaeval convents, it is fortified, 
and the whole settlement, courts and gardens included, 
is surrounded by a crenelated wall, originally about 
thirty feet high. 

There are occasional towers in the wall, and 
remains of arches supporting a passage of sufficient 
altitude for the defenders to look over the battle- 
ments. The old church in the centre of the court 
has had a narthex or nave added in Gothic style by 
the Benedictines, and here again are battlements, from 
which the monks could send down stones or boiling 
liquid upon assailants who penetrated the outer walls. 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 407 

Three sides of the court are surrounded by buildings ; 
beneath, there are massive arcades of stone for the 
kitchen, store-rooms, and refectory ; above, wooden 
galleries which supplied the monks with their cells. 
Most of this is now in ruins, occupied in part by 
peasants and their sheep. But the church, both in 
its external simplicity and its internal grandeur, is 
remarkable for the splendid decoration of its walls 
with mosaics, which, alas ! have been allowed to 
decay as much from the indolence of the Greeks as 
the intolerance of the Turks. In fact, while some 
care and regard for classical remains have gradually 
been instilled into the minds of the inhabitants — of 
course money value is an easily understood test — the 
respect for their splendid mediaeval remains has only 
gained Western intellects within recent years, so that 
we may expect another generation to elapse before 
this new kind of interest will be disseminated among 
the possessors of so great a bequest from the Middle 
Ages. 

The interior of the church at Daphne is a melan- 
choly example. From the effects of damp the mortar 
has loosened, and great patches of the precious mosaic 
have fallen to the ground. You can pick up handfuls 
of glazed and gilded fragments of which the rich 
surfaces were composed. Here and there a Turkish 
bullet has defaced a solemn saint, while the fires lit 
by soldiers in days of war, and by shepherds in time 
of peace, have, in many places, blackened the roof 
beyond recognition. Within the central cupola a 
gigantic head of Christ on gold ground is still visible, 
or was so when I saw the place in 1889; but the 
whole roof was in danger of falling, and the Greek 
Government, at the instigation of Dr. Dorpfeld, 
had undertaken to stay the progress of decay, and 
so the building was filled with scaffolding. This, 



408 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

however, enabled us to mount close to the figures, 
which in the short and high building are seen with 
difficulty from the ground, and so we distinguished 
clearly round the base of the cupola the twelve 
Apostles, in the bay arches the Prophets, in the 
transepts the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism, 
and the Transfiguration of Christ — all according to 
the strict models laid down for such ornaments by the 
Greek Church. The drawings are indeed stiff* and 
grotesque, but the gloom and mystery of the building 
hide all imperfections, and give to these imposing 
figures in black and gold a certain majesty, which 
must have been felt tenfold by simple worshippers 
not trained in habits of aesthetic criticism. 1 

We have, unfortunately, no records of the history 
of these convents, as in the case of many Western 
abbeys, and the old chronicles of wars and pestilences 
seldom mention this quiet life. We should fain, says 
M. Henri Belle, have followed the fortunes of these 
monks who left some fair Abbey in Burgundy to 
catechise schismatics in this distant land, and bring 
their preaching to aid the sword of the Crusaders ; but 
these Crusaders were generally intent on changing 
their cross for a crown, and were therefore not at 
all likely to favour the rigid proselytism of the 
Cistercians. It is very interesting to know that 
Innocent III., that great pope, who from the outset 
disapproved of the violent overthrow of the Christian 
Empire of the East, was the first to recommend, both 
to the conquerors and their clergy, such moderation 
as might serve to bring back the schismatic Greeks 
to the Roman fold. There are still extant several of 

1 During my visit in 1905, I saw this interesting church, now 
restored, but I fancy by German workmen who were too clever, and 
who filled in the gaps of colour, even on figures, with restoration! oi 
very modern flavour. 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 409 

his letters to the Abbeys of the Morea, and to this 
abbey of the duchy of Athens, showing that even his 
authority and zeal in this matter were unable to 
restrain the bigotry of the Latin monks. There 
were frequent quarrels, too, between these monks of 
Daphne and their Duke, and frequent appeals to the 
sovran pontiff to regulate the relations between the 
civil authority, which claimed the right of suzerain, 
and the religious orders, which claimed absolute 
independence and immunity from all feudal obliga- 
tions. Still, in spite of all disputes, the abbey was 
the last resting-place of the Frankish Dukes of 
Athens, and in a vault beneath the narthex were 
found several of their rude stone coffins without 
inscription or ornament. One only has carved upon 
it the arms of the second Guy de la Roche, third 
Duke of Athens — two entwined serpents surmounted 
with two fleurs-de-lis. Guy II., says the Chronicle, 
behaved as a gallant lord, beloved of all, and attained 
great renown in every kingdom. He sleeps here, not 
in the darkness of oblivion, but obscured by greater 
monuments of the greater dead. Yet I cannot but 
dally over this interesting piece of mediaeval history, 
the more so, as it explains the strange title of Theseus, 
Duke of Athens, in Shakespeare's immortal Mid- 
summer Night's Dream^ as well as the curious fact, 
at least to classical readers, that the poet should 
have chosen mediaeval Athens as a court of gracious 
manners, and suitable for the background of his fairy 
drama. 

Neglecting geography, I shall carry the reader next 
to the very analogous ruins of Mistra, where, how- 
ever, it was rather the Greek that supplanted the 
Latin, than the Latin the Greek ecclesiastic. 

When the Franks invaded Greece a very remark- 
able family, the Villehardouins, seized a part of the 



4 io RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Morea, and presently built Mistra, above Sparta ; it 
was adorned with fair Gothic churches and palaces, 
and surmounted by a fortress. Sixty years after the 
conquest, William Villehardouin was captured by 
a new Byzantine emperor Palaeologus, who was 
recovering his dominion. The Frank was obliged 
to cede for his ransom the forts of Mistra and 
Monemvasia, which from that time were strongholds 
of the Bvzantine power till the conquest of the 
Turks. Still the Villehardouins long kept hold of 
Kalamata and other forts ; and to the pen of one of 
the family, Geoffrey, we owe the famous old chronicle 
La Conquete de Constantinople, which is unique in its 
importance both as a specimen of old French and a 
piece of mediaeval history. 

The architecture of Mistra, begun at a noble epoch 
by the Latins, was taken up bv the Bvzantine Greeks, 
so that we have both styles combined in curious 
relics of the now deserted stronghold. For, since 
1850, when an earthquake shook down many houses, 
the population wandered to the revived Sparta, which 
is now a thriving town. But as the old Sparta in its 
greatest days was only a collection of shabby villages, 
showing no outward sign of its importance, so the 
new and vulgar Sparta has no attractions (save the 
lovely orange and lemon orchards round it) in com- 
parison with the mediaeval Mistra. The nouses are 
piled one above another till you reach the summit 
crowned by the citadel which, itself a mountain, is 
severed from the higher mountains at its back by a 
deep gorge with a tumbling river. c The whole town 
is now nothing but ruined palaces, churches, and 
houses. You wander up rudelv paved streets rising 
zigzag, and pass beneath arches on which are carved 
the escutcheons of French knights. You enter courts 
overgrown with grass, but full of memories of the 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 411 

Crusaders. It is the very home of the Middle Ages. 
Passing through these streets, now the resort of lizards 
and serpents, you come upon Frankish tombs, among 
others that of Theodora Tocco, wife of the Emperor 
Constantine Palasologus, who died in 1430. The 
Panagia is the only church well preserved — a Latin 
basilica, with a portico in the form of an Italian loggia, 
and a Byzantine tower added to it. This building is 
highly ornamented with delicate carving, and its walls 
are in alternate courses of brick and stone, while the 
gates, columns, and floor are of marble. The interior 
is adorned with Byzantine frescoes of scenes from the 
Old Testament. Higher up is the metropolitan 
church, built by the Greeks as soon as William 
Villehardouin had surrendered the fort in 1263. 
This great church is not so beautiful as that already 
described, but has many peculiarities of no less interest. 
The palace of the Frank princes was probably at the 
wide place on a higher level, where the ruined walls 
show the remains of many Gothic windows. The 
citadel was first rehandled by the Greek Palaeologi, 
then by the Turks, then by the Venetians, who in 
their turn seized this mediaeval "Fetter, of Greece." 
And now all the traces of all these conquerors are 
lying together confused in silence and decay. The 
heat of the sun in these narrow and stony streets, 
with their high walls, is intense. But you cannot but 
pause when you find in turn old Greek carving, 
Byzantine dedications, Roman inscriptions, Frankish 
devices, emblazoned on the walls. The Turkish 
baths alone are intact, and have resisted both weather 
and earthquake. But the churches occupy the chief 
place still, dropping now and then a stone, as it were 
a monumental tear for their glorious past ; the Greek 
Cross, the Latin Cross, the Crescent, have all ruled 
there in their turn. Even a pair of ruined minarets 



412 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

remain to show the traces of that slavery to which the 
people were subject for four hundred years.' 

The occupation of the Frankish knights had not 
found an adequate historian, since old Villehardouin, 
till Finlay's great work. Then Gregorovius wrote 
his Mediceval Athens} The traveller still sees through- 
out Greece frequent traces of this short domination, 
but all of one sort — the ruins of castles which the 
knights had built to overawe their subjects, and of 
which Clarentzen in Elis was perhaps the most 
important. The same invaders built the great towers 
at Kalamata, and most picturesque of all is the keep 
over the town of Karytena in Arcadia, the stronghold 
of Hugo de Bruyeres. But the Frankish devices 
which adorned these castles have been mostly torn 
down by Turks, or replaced by the Venetian lion, 
according as new invaders turned the fortifications of 
their predecessors to their own uses. Nor are any of 
these castles to be compared in size or splendour with 
those of northern Europe. The most famous of them, 
the palace at Thebes, was so completelv destroyed by 
the Catalans, that all vestige of it has disappeared, and 
we owe our knowledge of it to the description of the 
Catalan annalist, Ramon Aluntaner, who tells of the 
ravages of his fellows not without some stings of his 
aesthetic conscience. 

But let us pass from these complex ruins, which 
speak of the conflict of the East and West, to the 
peculiar quiet homes of the Greek monk, who spends 
his time, not in works of charitv, not in labours of 
erudition, not in the toil of education, like his Western 

1 The researches of Carl Hopf, buried in a horrid quarto of Ersch and 
Gruber's Encyacfcedia, on dirty paper and in vile type, are of great value 
to those who can endure to read them. This has been accomplished by 
Sir Rennell Rodci, whose two volumes (the Princes of Achaia) on the 
Frankish conquest are excellent, though too full of detail. 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 413 

brother, bat simply in performing an arduous and 
exacting ritual, in praying, or rather in repeating 
prayers, so many hours in the day, in observing fasts 
and vigils, above all in maintaining the strict creed 
which has given the title of orthodox to his Church. 
These resting-places ([xovr] is the suggestive word) are 
of course settled in quiet regions, in the mountains, 
upon the islands, so that we cannot expect them near 
a stirring capital like Athens. Yet in the gorge of 
the defile which leads up to Phyle, there is a little 
skete (the house of ascetics) lonely and wild in site ; 
and by the sea on Salamis, nearly over against Megara, 
the traveller will find a small but very characteristic 
specimen of the Greek monastery, the Panagia 
Phaneromene. 

There he will see the tiny cells, and the library, 
almost as small as any of them, at the top of dark 
stairs, and containing some twenty volumes ; he will 
be received by the Hegoumenos with mastic and jam^ 
and then with coffee, and strive to satisfy the simple 
curiosity of the old men, who seem so anxious to hear 
about the world, and yet have turned away their eyes 
from seeing it. Above all, he will find in the midst 
of the enclosure a little model Byzantine Church, 
built with the greatest neatness, of narrow bricks, in 
which string-courses and crosses are introduced by an 
altered setting of the bricks. Here too he will see the 
curious practice, which led to marble imitations at 
Venice, of ornamenting the walls by building in green 
and blue pottery — apparently old Rhodian ware, for it 
is not now to be found in use. It is a simpler form 
of the decoration already described in the Cathedral of 
Athens, that of ornamenting a wall with foreign 
objects symmetrically disposed, and no one who sees it 
will call it inartistic. Within are the usual ornaments 
of the Byzantine Church, but not in mosaic j for all 



4H RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

the walls are covered with frescoes by a monk of the 
early eighteenth century, a genius in his way, though 
following strictly the traditions of the school of Athos. 
The traveller who ascends the pulpit will thence see 
himself surrounded by very strange pictures — over the 
west door, as is prescribed, the Last Judgment, with 
the sins of men being weighed in a huge balance, and 
devils underneath trying to pull down the fatal scale. 
The condemned are escorted by demons to an enormous 
mouth breathing out flames — the mouth of hell. 
Beatitudes and tortures supply the top and bottom of 
the composition. Even more quaint is the miracle of 
the swine of the Gadarenes running down a steep 
place into the sea. They are drowning in the waves, 
and on the head or back of each is a little black devil 
trying to save himself from sinking. Similar creatures 
are escaping from the statues of heathen gods which 
tumble from the walls as the infant Jesus passes by on 
his flight to Egypt. This points to the belief that 
the statues of heathen gods were inhabited by an evil 
spirit, and were actually bodies with souls within them ! 
These few details are sufficient to tempt the reader 
to visit this monastery, which is far better worth 
seeing than the beautifully situated and hospitable 
Vourkano described elsewhere in this work. There 
is an enchanting trip from Vostitza, on the coast of 
Achaia, to Megaspilion, to which I will devote a 
page at the end of this chapter. So also I will here 
pass by with a mere mention the eyries of Meteora in 
Thessaly, perched upon strange pinnacles of rock, like 
S. Simeon upon his pillar. The approach to, and 
descent from, these monasteries in a swinging net is 
indeed a strange adventure to undergo, and more pain- 
fully unpleasant than most such adventures, but at the 
top there is little of interest. The hoards of precious 
MSS. which Curzon describes in his delightful volume, 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 415 

over which the monks quarrelled when he offered gold, 
and would not sell them because none would allow his 
brother to enjoy the money — these splendid illuminated 
books have either been cozened away by visitors, or 
are gathered in the University Library at Athens. 
They are there in their right place. I understand the 
peaks of Meteora, when the present occupants die out, 
are to receive not holy men, but criminals, who are to 
suffer their solitary confinement, not in dungeons 
beneath the earth, but far above the haunts of men. 

But all these monastic settlements pale into insignifi- 
cance when we turn to Mount Athos, the real Holy 
of Holies of the Greek Church, which is indeed far 
from the kingdom of Greece, and therefore beyond 
the scope of this work, and yet a chapter on the 
medievalism of Eastern Europe can hardly be written 
without some consideration of this strange promontory, 
in its beauty surpassing all description, in its history 
unique both for early progress and for subsequent 
unchangeableness, in its daily life a faithful mirror of 
long- past centuries, even as its buildings are now 
mediaeval castles inhabited by mediaeval men. I will 
here set down the impressions, from a visit made in 
1889, not merely of the art, but of the life of this, the 
most distinctive as well as the largest example of 
Greek monasticism. 

Vellficatus Athos is an expression which has a mean- 
ing even now, though a very different one from that 
implied by Juvenal. The satirist would not believe 
that Xerxes turned it into an island, though the 
remains of the canal are plainly visible to the present 
day. But now the incompetence of the Turkish 
Government has turned Athos, for English travellers, 
into an island, for it may only be approached by sea. 
If you attempt to ride there from Salonica or Cavalla, 
you are at once warned that you do so at your own 



416 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

risk ; that the tariff now fixed by a joint commission 
of Turks, dragomans, and bandits for the release of an 
English captive is ^15,000 ; that you will have to pay 
that sum yourself, etc. etc. This is enough to drive any 
respectable and responsible person from the enterprise 
of the land journey, and so he must wait for the rare 
and irregular chances of boat or steamer traffic. It 
was my good fortune to find one of H.M.'s ships 
going that way from Salonica, and with a captain 
gracious enough to drop me on the headland, or 
rather to throw me up on it, for we landed in a 
heavy sea, with considerable risk and danger, and the 
T/HKiyua, as they classically call it, lasted all day, and 
raged around the Holy Mountain. Yet this adven- 
turous way of landing under the great western cliffs 
of the promontory, with the monasteries of S. Paul, 
Gregory, and Dionysius, each on their several peaks, 
looking down upon us from a dizzy height through 
the stormy mists, was doubtless far the most pic- 
turesque introduction we could have had to the long- 
promised land. 

For this had been many years my desire not only 
to see the strangest and most perfect relic now extant 
of mediaeval superstition, but to find, if possible, in 
the early MSS. which throng the libraries of that 
famous retreat some cousin, if not some uncle or 
aunt of the great illuminated MSS. which are the 
glory of the early Irish Church. The other travellers 
who have reached this place have done so by arriving 
at some legitimate port on the tamer eastern side ; 
the latest, Mr. Rilev, 1 by landing at the gentlest and 
most humane spot of all, the bay of Vatopedi. We, 

1 Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks. By Athelstan Riley. 
Longmans, 1887. Thir is the best English book known to me on 
the subject. Brockhaus' German monograph on the art is the work of 
a specialist, and most instructive. 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 417 

on the contrary, crept into a little boat-harbour under 
the strictest, the most primitive, and far the most 
beautiful of the western eagles' nests, whither English 
pickles, tinned lobster, and caviare have not yet pene- 
trated. We were doing a very informal and uncere- 
monious thing, for we were invading the outlying 
settlements, to demand shelter and hospitality, whereas 
we should have first of all proceeded to the capital, 
Karyes, to present pompous letters of introduction from 
Papas, Prime Ministers, Patriarchs, and to receive 
equally elaborate missives from the central committee, 
asking the several monasteries to entertain us. 

But we took the place by storm, not by regular 
siege. We showed our letters, when we climbed up 
to Dionysiu, as they call it, and prayed them to fore- 
stall the hospitality which they would doubtless show 
us, if we returned with official sanction. The good 
monks were equal to the occasion ; they waived cere- 
mony, though ceremony lords it in these conservative 
establishments, and every violation of it is called a 
Trpocrf3o\rj, probably the greatest sin that a monk can 
commit. At every step of our route this obstacle 
stood before us, and had we attempted to force our 
way past it, no doubt our dumb mules would have 
spoken, and reproved our madness. Yet when they 
had before them all the missives which were to be 
read at Karyes next day, to be followed up by a letter 
addressed to themselves, they actually antedated their 
hospitality, and made us feel at home and happy. 

Nowhere have I seen more perfect and graceful 
hospitality in spirit, nowhere a more genuine attempt 
to feed the hungry and shelter the outcast, even 
though the means and materials for doing so were 
often very inadequate to Western notions. But let 
me first notice the extant comforts. We always had 
ample room in special strangers' apartments, which 

2 E 



4 i8 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

occupy the highest and most picturesque place in 
every monastery. We always had clean beds to sleep 
in, nor were we disturbed by any unbidden bed- 
fellows, these creatures having (as we were told) 
made it a rule of etiquette never to appear or molest 
any one till after Pascha, the Feast of the Resur- 
rection. The feast was peculiarly late this year, and 
the weather perfect summer ; still the insects care- 
fully avoided any such irpoo-fioXrj towards us as to 
violate their Lenten fast. In addition to undisturbed 
nights — a great boon to weary travellers — we had 
always good black bread, and fresh every day ; we 
had also excellent Turkish coffee, and fortunately 
most wholesome, for the ceremony of the place 
requires you to drink it whenever vou enter, and 
whenever you leave, any domicile whatever. Seven 
or eight times a day did we partake of this luxury, 
and without damage to digestion or nerves. There 
was sound red wine, and plenty of it, varying accord- 
ing to the makers, but mostly good, and only in one 
case slightly resinated. There were also excellent 
hazel-nuts, often served hot, roasted in a pan, and 
very palatable. 

What else was there good ? There was jam of 
many kinds, all good, though unfortunately served 
neat, and to be eaten in spoonfuls, without any bread, 
till at last we committed the prosvole of asking to 
have it brought back when there was bread on the 
table. There were also eggs in abundance, just 
imported to be ready for Easter, and therefore fresh, 
and served au plat. Nor had we anywhere to make 
the complaint so pathetic in Mr. Riley's book, that 
the oil or butter used in cooking was rancid. This 
is the advantage of going in spring, or rather one of 
the many advantages, that both oil and butter (the 
latter is of course rare) were quite unobjectionable. 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 419 

When I say that butter was rare and eggs imported, 
I assume that the reader knows of the singularity of 
Athos, which consists in the absence of the greatest 
feature of human life — woman, and all inferior imita- 
tions of her in the animal world. Not a cow, not a 
hen, not a goat ; not a cat of that sex ! And this 
for centuries ! Three thousand monks, kept up by 
importation, three thousand labourers or servants, 
imported likewise, but no home production of animals 
— that is considered odious and impious. And when, 
in this remote nook of extreme conservatism, this 
one refuge from the snares and wiles of Eve, a 
Russian monk seriously proposed to us the propriety 
of admitting the other sex, we felt a shock as of an 
earthquake, and began to understand the current 
feeling that the Russians were pushing their influence 
at Athos, in order to transform the Holy Mountain 
into a den of political thieves. 

Nothing is more curious than to study the 
effects, upon a large society, of the total exclusion 
of the female sex. It is commonly thought that 
men by themselves must grow rude and savage - 9 
that it is to women we owe all the graces and 
refinements of social intercourse. Nothing can be 
farther from the truth. I venture to say that in 
all the world there is not so perfectly polite and 
orderly a society as that of Athos. As regards hospi- 
tality and gracious manners, the monks and their 
servants put to shame the most polished Western 
people. Disorder, tumult, confusion, seem impossible 
in this land of peace. If they have differences, and 
squabble about rights of property, these things are 
referred to law courts, and determined by argument 
of advocates, not by disputing and high words among 
the claimants. While life and property are still un- 
safe on the mainland, and on the sister peninsulas of 



4 2o RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

Cassandra and Longos, Athos has been for centuries 
as secure as any county in England. So far, then, all 
the evidence is in favour of the restriction. Many 
of the monks, being carried to the peninsula in early 
youth, have completely forgotten what a woman is 
like, except for the brown smoky pictures of the 
Panagia with her infant in all the churches, which 
the strict iconography of the Orthodox Church has 
made as unlovely and non-human as it is possible for 
a picture to be. So far, so well. 

But if the monks imagined they could simply 
expunge the other sex from their life without any 
but the obvious consequences, they were mistaken. 
What strikes the traveller is not the rudeness, the 
untidiness, the discomfort of a purely male society, 
it is rather its dulness and depression. Some of the 
older monks were indeed jolly enough ; they drank 
their wine, and cracked their jokes freely. But the 
novices who attended at table, the men and boys who 
had come from the mainland to work as servants, 
muleteers, labourers, seemed all suffering under a 
permanent silence and sadness. The town of Karyes 
is the most sombre and gloomy place I ever saw. 
There are no laughing groups, no singing, no games 
among the boys. Every one looked serious, solemn, 
listless, vacant, as the case might be, but devoid of 
keenness and interest in life. At first one might 
suspect that the monks were hard taskmasters, ruling 
their servants as slaves ; but this is not the real solu- 
tion. It is that the main source of interest and cause 
of quarrel in all these animals, human and other, does 
not exist. For the dulness was not confined to the 
young monks or the laity ; it had invaded even the 
lower animals. The tom-cats, which were there in 
crowds, passed one another in moody silence along the 
roofs. They seemed permanently dumb. And if the 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 421 

cocks had not lost their voice, and crowed frequently 
in the small hours of the morning, their note seemed 
to me a wail, not a challenge — the clear though un- 
conscious expression of a great want in their lives. 

How different were the notes of the nightingales, 
the pigeons, the jays, whose wings emancipate them 
from monkish restrictions, and whose music fills with 
life all the enchanting glens, brakes, and forests in this 
earthly Paradise ! 

For if an exquisite situation in the midst of historic 
splendour, a marvellous variety of outline and climate, 
and a vegetation rich and undisturbed beyond com- 
parison, can make a modern Eden possible, it is here. 
Nature might be imagined gradually improving in her 
work when she framed the three peninsulas of the 
Chalcidice. The westernmost, the old Pallene, once 
the site of the historic Olynthus, is broad and flat, 
with no recommendation but its fertility ; the second, 
Sithonia, makes some attempt at being picturesque, 
having an outline of gently serrated hills, which rise, 
perhaps, to 1000 feet, and are dotted with woods. 
Anywhere else, Sithonia might take some rank, but 
within sight of the mighty Olympus, and beside the 
giant Athos, it remains obscure and without a history. 
Athos runs out into the iEgean, with its outermost 
cone standing 6500 feet out of the sea, and as such is 
(I believe) far the most striking headland in Europe. 
You may see higher Alps, but from a height, and with 
intervening heights to lessen the effect ; you may see 
higher Carpathians, but from the dull plain of land in 
Hungary. Here you can enjoy the full splendour 
of the peak from the sea, from the fringe of white 
breakers round the base up to the pale-grey, snow- 
streaked dome, which reaches beyond torrent and 
forest into heaven. Within two or three hours you 
can ascend from gardens of oranges and lemons, figs 



422 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

and olives, through woods of arbutus, myrtle, cytisus, 
heath, and carpets of forget-me-not, anemone, iris, 
orchid, to the climate of primroses and violets, and to 
the stunted birch and gnarled fir which skirt the 
regions of perpetual snow. Moreover, the gradually 
increasing ridge which forms the backbone of the 
peninsula is seamed on both sides with constant glens 
and ravines, in each of which tumbling water gives 
movement to the view, and life to the vegetation 
which, even where it hides in its rich luxuriance the 
course of the stream, cannot hush the sounding voice. 
Here the nightingale sings all the day long, and the 
fair shrubs grow, unmolested by those herds of wander- 
ing goats, which are the real locusts of the wild lands 
of southern Europe. 

Each side of the main ridge has its peculiarities of 
vegetation, that facing north-east being gentler in 
aspect, and showing brakes of Mediterranean heath 
ten or fifteen feet high, through which mule-paths are 
cut as through a forest. The coast facing south-west 
is far sterner, wilder, and more precipitous, but enjoys 
a temperature almost tropical ; for there the plants and 
fruits of southern Greece flourish without stint. 

The site of the western monasteries is generally on 
a precipitous rock at the mouth of one of the ravines, 
and commands a view up the glen to the great summit 
of the mountain. To pass from any one of these 
monasteries to the next, you must either clamber down 
a precipice to the sea, and pass round in a boat com- 
manded by a skipper-monk, or you must mount the 
mules provided, and ride round the folds and seams of 
the precipices, on paths incredibly dangerous of aspect, 
and yet incredibly free from any real disasters. When 
you come to a torrent you must descend by zigzag 
windings till you reach a practicable ford near the sea- 
level, and cross it at the foot of some sounding fall. 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 423 

But the next projecting shoulder stands straight out of 
the sea, and you must climb again a similar breakneck 
ascent, till you reach a path along the edge of the dizzy 
cliff, where you pass with one foot in the air, over the 
sea 1000 feet beneath, while the other is nudged now 
and then by the wall of the rock within, so that the 
cautious mule chooses the outer ledge of the road, since 
a loss of balance means strictly a loss of life. It was 
our constant regret that none of the party could sketch 
the beautiful scenes which were perpetually before us, 
or even photograph them. But the efforts of photo- 
graphers hitherto have been very disappointing. There 
are indeed pictures of most of the monasteries, taken 
at the instigation of the Russians, but all so wretchedly 
inadequate, so carefully taken from the wrong point, 
that we deliberately avoided accepting them, or carry- 
ing them home. Mr. Riley, too, a man of taste and 
feeling, had essayed the thing with leisure and ex- 
perience in his art, and yet the cuts taken from 
the photographs, which are published in his book, 
are also hopelessly inadequate. When, for example, 
approaching from the north, we suddenly came in view 
of Simopetra — standing close to us, across a yawning 
chasm, with the sea roaring 1000 feet beneath, high 
in the air on its huge, lonely crag, holding on to the 
land by a mere viaduct, and behind it the great rocks 
and gorges and forests framed by the snowy dome of 
Athos in the far background, — we felt that the world 
could produce no finer scene, and that the most riotous 
artistic imagination, such as Gustave Dore's, would be 
tamed in its presence by the inability of human pencil 
to exceed it. 1 The plan of this monastery and its 
smaller brothers (I was going to call them sisters !) is 

1 The very few travellers who have seen this, the most picturesque of 
all European buildings, must have heard with a painful shock that it was 
burned down in the spr.ng of 1891. 



424 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap, 

that of a strong square keep, rising straight from the 
sheer cliffs, with but a single bridge of rock leading 
landwards, and when the wall has been carried to a 
height far more than sufficient against any attack save 
modern artillery, they begin to throw round it storeys 
of balconies, stayed out from the wall by very light 
wooden beams, each balcony sheltered by that above, 
till a deep-pitched roof overhangs the whole. The 
topmost and outermost corner of these balconies is 
always the guest-chamber or chambers, and from this 
lofty nook you not only look out upon the sea and 
land, but between the chinks of the floor of boards you 
see into air under your feet, and reflect that if a storm 
swept round the cliff your frail tenement might collapse 
like a house of cards, and wander into the sea far 
beneath. To me, at least, it was impossible to walk 
round these balconies without an occasional shudder, 
and yet we could not hear that the slender supports 
had ever given way, or that any of the monks had ever 
been launched into the air. On the divans running 
round these aerial guest-chambers are beautiful rugs 
from Macedonia and Bulgaria, the ancient gifts of 
pilgrims and of peasants, which were thrust aside in 
the rich and vulgar Russian establishments for the 
gaudy products of modern Constantinople and Athens, 
while the older and simpler monasteries were content 
with their soft and mellow colours. The wealth of 
Athos in these rugs is very great. There were con- 
stantly on the mules under us saddle-cloths which 
would be the glory of an aesthetic drawing-room. 

But it is high time for us to take a closer view of 
the inside of these curious castles, some of which, 
Vatopedi, Iviron, Lavra, are almost towns surrounded 
by great fortifications, and which possess not only 
large properties, outlying farms, dependencies, but 
within them a whole population of monks and their 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 425 

retainers. Let us first speak of the treasures accumu- 
lated within them, relics of ancient art and industry 
in the way of books, pictures, and work in precious 
metals. The reader will doubtless appreciate that the 
estimate of some of these things depends largely on the 
taste and education of the visitor. Mr. Riley thinks 
it of importance, in his excellent work, to enumerate 
the exact number of chapels contained in, or attached 
to, each monastery, whereas to me the exact number, 
and the name of the patron saint, seems about the last 
detail with which I should trouble my readers. So 
also some sentimental travellers enumerate with care 
the alleged relics, and Mr. Riley lets it be seen plainly 
not only that he is disposed to believe in their genuine- 
ness, but that, if proven, it is of the highest religious 
importance. Seeing the gross ignorance of the monks 
on all really important matters of history, such as the 
real date and foundation of their several monasteries, 
the ascription of a relic to some companion of our 
Lord, or some worthy of the first four centuries, seems 
to me ridiculous. 

With this preamble I turn first to the books. Every 
convent we visited had a library containing MSS. The 
larger had in addition many printed books ; in one, for 
example, which was not rich (Esphigmenu), we found 
a fine bound set of Migne's " Fathers." The library 
room was generally a mere closet with very little light, 
and there was no sign that anybody ever read there. 
The contents indeed consisted of ecclesiastical books, 
prayer-books, lesson-books, rituals noted for chanting, 
of which they had working copies in their churches. 
Still they are so careless concerning the teaching of 
their old service-books that they have completely lost 
the meaning of the old musical notation, which appears 
in dots and commas (generally red) over their older 
texts, and they now follow a new tradition with a new 



426 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

notation. When one has seen some hundreds of these 
Gospels, and extracts from the Gospels, ranging over 
several centuries, some written in gold characters on 
the title-page, with conventional pictures of the 
Evangelists on gold ground, one begins to wonder 
what could have possessed the good monks to occupy 
themselves with doing over and over again what had 
been done hundreds of times, and lay before them in 
multitudes of adequate copies. I suppose the nature 
of their religious worship suggests the true answer. 
As they count it religion to repeat over and over again 
prayers and lessons all through their nights of vigil and 
their days of somnolence, so they must have thought 
it acceptable to God, and a meritorious work, to keep 
copying out, in a fair hand, Gospels that nobody would 
read and that nobody would disturb for centuries on 
dusty shelves. 

In the twelve libraries I examined I did not find 
more than half a dozen secular books, and these of late 
date, and copies of well-known texts. There may of 
course be some stray treasures still concealed in nooks 
and corners, though a good scholar, Mr. Lambros of 
Athens, has spent much labour in classifying and 
cataloguing these MSS. But I saw chests here and 
there in out-of-the-way lumber rooms, with a few 
books lying in them, and believe that in this way 
something valuable may still be concealed. In general 
the monks were friendly and ready to show their 
books, or at least their perfect manners made them 
appear so ; but in one monastery (Stavronikita) they 
were clearly anxious that none of these treasures should 
be studied. They had not only tossed together all 
their MSS. which had been recently set in order by 
Mr. Lambros, but had torn off the labels with which 
he had numbered them, without any attempt, or I 
believe intention, of replacing them with new ones. 



xvi MEDIAEVAL GREECE 427 

As I am not now addressing learned readers, I need 
not go into details about the particular books which 
interested me. My main object had been to find, if 
possible, at Mount Athos some analogy, some parallel, 
to the splendid school of ornamentation which has left 
us the Book of Kelts , the Lindisfarne Gospels^ St. Chad's 
Gospel at Lichfield, and other such masterpieces of 
Irish illumination. I have always thought it likely 
that some early Byzantine missionary found his way 
to Ireland, and gave the first impulse to a local school 
of art. That there is a family likeness between early 
Irish and Byzantine work seems to me undeniable. 
I can hardly say whether I was disappointed or not to 
find that, as far as Athos went, the Irish school was 
perfectly independent, and there was no early book 
which even remotely suggested the marvellous designs 
of the Book of Kells. The emblems of the Evangelists 
seemed unknown there before the eleventh century. 
There was ample use of gilding, and a good knowledge 
of colours. In one or two we found a dozen kinds of 
birds adequately portrayed in colours — the peacock, 
pheasant, red-legged partridge, stork, etc., being at 
once recognisable. But all the capitals were upon the 
same design, all the bands of ornament were little more 
than blue diaper on gold ground. There were a good 
many books in slanting uncials, probably seventh to 
ninth century ; an occasional page or fragment of 
earlier date, but nothing that we could see of value 
for solving the difficulties of a Scripture text. Careful 
and beautiful handwritings on splendid vellum of the 
succeeding centuries were there in countless abundance. 
They are valuable as specimens of handwriting and as 
nothing else. In many of the libraries the monk in 
charge was quite intelligent about the dates of the 
MSS., and was able to read the often perplexing colo- 
phon in which the century and indiction were recorded. 



428 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

But the number of dated MSS. was, alas ! very 
small. 

I now turn to the Keifi-qXia or treasures in precious 
metals and gems, which have often been described and 
belauded by travellers. Each visitor sees something 
to admire which the rest pass over in silence, or else 
he is shown something not noticed by the rest. So 
the reader must consult first Curzon, then Mr. Tozer, 
then Didron, then Mr. Riley, and even after that there 
remain many things to be noted by fresh observers. 
The fact is that the majority of these reliquaries, 
pictures, and ornaments of the screen are tawdry and 
vulgar, either made or renewed lately, and in bad taste. 
It is only here and there that a splendid piece of old 
work strikes us with its strange contrast. Far the 
most interesting of all the illustrations given by Mr. 
Riley is that of the nave of one of the Churches, 
which are all (except the old Church of Karyes) built 
on exactly the same plan, with small variations as 
regards the lighting, or the outer narthex, or the 
dimensions. An architect would find these variations 
highly interesting ; to the amateur there seems a great 
sameness. But among the uniform, or nearly uniform, 
features is a huge candelabrum, not the central one 
hung from the middle of the dome, but one which 
encircles it, hung by brass chains from the inner edges 
of the dome, consisting of twelve (sometimes only ten) 
straight bands of open-worked brass, of excellent design, 
joined with hinges, which are set in double eagles (the 
Byzantine emblem) so that they form large decagons 
or duodecagons, in the upper edge of which candles 
are set all round. The design and work of these 
candelabra appeared to me old. But the monks 
affirmed that they were now made in Karyes. This 
I did not believe, and in any case my suspicions as to 
the antiquity of the design were confirmed by one I 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 429 

found in St. Paul's (Agio Pavlo), which bears on one 
of the double eagles an inscription that the Hegoumenos 
had restored and beautified the church in 1850. But 
this eagle joined brass bands, on which was a clear 
German inscription, stating that they were made in 
Dresden in the year 1660. 

By far the finest embroideries in silk were at the 
rich convent of Iviron, and indeed the main church 
there has many features worthy of note. The floor is 
of elaborate old mosaic, with an inscription of George 
the Founder, which the monks refer to the tenth 
century. There are quaint Rhodian plaques, both set 
in the outer wall, and also laid like carpets, with a 
border of fine design, on the walls of the transept 
domes. Beside them are remarkable old Byzantine 
capitals designed of rams' heads. But the great piece 
of embroidery is a TroSua (or apron of the Panagia). 
The ground is gold and green silk, on which portraits 
of the three imperial founders are worked — their 
crowns of pearls, their dressses of white silk, their 
beards of brown silk, and their faces painted most 
delicately in colours upon silk. Never in my life 
have I seen any embroidery so perfect and so precious. 
There were also occasional old crosses of great excel- 
lence, but to describe them here would be tedious and 
useless, unless it be to stimulate the reader to go out 
and see them for himself; nor can I recommend this, 
if he be not a well-introduced traveller, ready to rough 
it, and to face with good temper many obstacles. 
Travelling in Turkey, where time has no value, and 
where restrictions upon liberty are both arbitrary and 
unjust, is a matter of great patience. 

What shall we say of the services which go on 
most of the day and night in these monastic churches, 
and which seemed to Messrs. Riley and Owen so 
interesting and so in harmony with the Church of 



430 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap. 

England, that they were never tired of regretting the 
separation of Anglican from Greek Christianity, and 
hoping for a union or reunion between them ? Mr. 
Owen went so far as to celebrate the Eucharist after 
the Anglican ritual in one or two of these churches 
before a crowd of monks, who could not understand 
his words, far less the spirit with which our Church 
regards the Holy Table. 

Yet here are large companies of men, who have 
given up the world to live on hard fare and strict rule, 
spending days and nights in the service of God, and 
resigning the ordinary pleasures and distractions of 
the world. Surely here there must be some strong 
impulse, some living faith which sways so many lives. 
And yet after long and anxious searching for some 
spiritual life, after hours spent in watching the prayers 
and austerities of the monks, we could not but come 
to the conclusion that here was no real religion y that 
it was a mountain, if not a valley, 'full of dry bones, 
and, behold, they were very dry.' 

It is of course very hazardous for a stranger to 
assert a negative ; there may be, even in this cold and 
barren ritual, some real breath of spiritual life, and 
some examples of men who serve God in spirit and 
in truth. But the general impression, as compared 
with that of any Western religion — Roman Catholic, 
Protestant, Unitarian — is not favourable. Very possibly 
no Western man will ever be in real sympathy with 
Orientals in spiritual matters, and Orientals these 
monks are in the strictest sense. They put a stress 
upon orthodoxy as such, which to most of us is incom- 
prehensible. They regard idleness as not inconsistent 
with the highest and holiest life. They consider the 
particular kind of food which they eat of far more 
religious importance than to avoid excess in eating 
and drinking. How can we judge such people by 



xvi MEDIEVAL GREECE 431 

our standards ? To them it seems to be religion to 
sit at service in a stall all night, perhaps keeping their 
eyes open, but in a vague trance, thinking of nothing, 
and not following one word that is being chaunted, 
while they ignore teaching, preaching, active charity, 
education of the young, as not worthy of the anchorite 
and the recluse. To us the aypvirvia which we 
attended seemed the most absolute misconception of 
the service of God - } to the monks this was the very 
acme of piety. 

I have spoken unreservedly of these things, as I 
learned that these gentle and hospitable souls were 
impossible to please in one respect — they think all 
criticism of their life most rude and unjust. They 
complained to me bitterly of Mr. Riley's book, which 
they had learned to know from extracts published in 
Greek papers, and yet could there be a more generous 
and sympathetic account than his ? If, then, I must 
in any case (though I deeply regret it) incur their 
resentment, it is better to do so for a candid judgment, 
than to endeavour to escape it by writing a mere 
panegyric, which would mislead the reader without 
satisfying the monks. Indeed, in one point I could 
not even satisfy myself. No panegyric could adequately 
describe their courteous and unstinted hospitality. 

MEGASPILION 

But there are many, to whom a visit to Mount Athos is impos- 
sible, who would yet gladly have the curious experience of spending 
a day, or a night, in a Greek monastery. I have already spoken 
of the Phaneromene at Salamis — a house too small, and too near 
the world of men and of civilisation, to give an adequate idea of 
this curious life. For there is in these abodes of simplicity and 
asceticism not only the dignity of old standing, but of treasure, 
and not a little real, though barbaric, splendour. Strange it is, 
that any visitor to Greece from the West passes within two or 
three hours' journey of a very perfect specimen, and one still 



432 RAMBLES IN GREECE chap, xvi 

untouched by the vulgarities of modern life. As the train takes 
us from Patras along the north coast of Peloponnesus (above, 
p. 30) we pass Yostitza, the ancient Jsgion, the home of Aratus, 
and then reach a station called Diakophto, in the cutting, where 
a river descends from the interior through a great cleft or canon, 
affording a glimpse into a wild glen feathered with trees. Up 
this glen there is a little light railway, specially contrived for an 
Alpine ascent, which is, indeed, a triumph of engineering, and this 
carries the traveller in its single carriage (for the engine cannot 
drag up more) into the interior of Achaia. The gorge is too nar- 
row to afford more than a peep up, and a peep down, from the 
train, till the country opens a little at the station of Megaspilion. 
Here there are mules ready, if ordered duly beforehand, and the 
astonished tourist sees far up in the sky over his head the goal of 
his journey plastered on to the lofty rock, like the mud nest of some 
swallows, save that some of the cells are unfortunately colored 
white and blue. The ascent seems at first sight well-nigh impos- 
sible; but by dint of patient zigzagging up a very steep and 
rock}" slope, the mules gradually reach a belt of fruit trees, 
planted in terraces under the monastery, and then at last the 
rude level, where the cells of the monks are fastened to the rock, 
and where many windows in the face of the cliff show that all the 
settlement is attached to a great cave, whence its name (pteyi 
c-rj\aiov). The whole church, indeed, the centre of the monastery, 
is inside the rock, with a gallery outside it, and has of course 
hardly any light in the interior, where the dim glare of lamps 
and of torches makes all its rich ornaments and the rich vest- 
ments of the priests glow in their amber light. Under the church 
are huge cellars with vast stores of resined wine in colossal barrels, 
kept for the use of the flocks of pilgrims who fulfil their vows of 
visiting this holy place. Formerly the traveller had to trust to 
the lodging and fare provided by the monks, which, though gen- 
erously bestowed, was not of the sort that the man from the 
West can relish. Now, by the pious bequest of a rich friend of 
the monastery, a neat little inn has been built on a projecting 
rock, with splendid views down into the valley and toward the 
south, and this house was both fresh and comfortable when a 
party of us occupied it. The host was an intelligent man, who 
understood some English, and the charges were not yet exorbitant. 
From this resting place it is but a few yards to the church in the 
rock, where there were services going on for most of the day and 
night, as it was Holy Week. I need not repeat what has already 
been said about the rich vestments, the jewelled relique c. : 
and the general wealth of color in which the church abounds. It 
is just like one of the churches at Mount Athos. Let the travel- 
ler to Greece not neglect to visit it. This is my parting advice. 



INDEX 



About, M. E., 7, 8, 12 

Acro-Corinthus, 323 sq. 

Acropolis of Athens, first view of, 
37, 78 sq.$ bombarded by Vene- 
tians, 80 j by Turks, 85 ; works 
on, 89 j excavations about, 
103-5 > tne v i ew from, 128 sq. 

Adler, Dr., his theory concerning 
Mycenae, 396 

iEgean, the 24-5 

^gina, 34, 143, 349 sq. 

^Egion, 31 

^Eschines, 244, 245, 268 

^Eschylus, 73, 96, 109, 142 

^Esculapius, temple of, at Athens, 
46, 118 

Agatharchus, scene-painter, 107 

Air, lightness and clearness of, 212 

Akraephiae, researches at, 217 

Albanian costume in Greece, 209 

Alfieri, 113 

Alkamenes, 93, 255-6, 259-60 

Alpheus, the, 251-2, 263, 283, 
294-5 

Alpine character of Greece, 130 

Altis, the, at Olympia, 252 sq. 

Amber, Baltic, 391 

Anaxagoras, 117 

Antiope, the, of Euripides, 196 

Aphrodite of -/Egina, 350 

Apollo, temple of, at Delphi, 234 
sq. j at Bassa?, 299 sq. 

Arachova, in Phocis, 228 sq. j in 
Kynuria, 362 

Aratus, 31 



Arcadia, 289 sq. j the ideal, 290 
sq. j description of, 293, 

3*3. 
Archaic and archaistic, 60 
Ardaillon, M., on Laurium mines, 

142 
Areopagus, the, 118 sq. 
Argion, 374 

Argos, 335 sq.', art of, 344 
Aristion, stele of, 63 
Aristophanes, 9, 10, 334 
Art, Greek, reserve of, 70-1 sq., 

97-8 5 progress of, 94-5 j schools 

° f , 344 
Asopus, the, 192 
Aspendus, theatre of, 107 
Asphodel, meadow of, 372 
Assyrian features in old Greek art, 

217 
Astros, 359 
Athaia, temple of, 351 
Athena Nike, temple of, 100 
Athens, size of, 3 j faces eastward, 

16 j museums of, 51, 53 sq. j 

ancient syncekismos of, 143 j 

Byzantine art in, 404 j dukes 

of, 409 • 
Athletics, Greek, 267-9, 2 % z 
Athos, Mount, 404, 415 sq. 
Atreus, treasure-house of, 376 j 

portal restored, 377, 381 
Attica, description of, 128 sq. 



Barathrum, the, 76 
Bassae, 299-300 sq. 



433 



2 P 






434 



RAMBLES IN GREECE 



Bathroom, archaic, at Tiryns, 

398 sq. 
Beule, M., quoted, 283, 294 
Boating, 353 
Bceotia, 191 sq. 
Book of Kelts, 384, 427 
Bournouf, M. E., 342 
Boxing, 276 
Brauron, 129, 164 
Brigands, 155, 162-4, *66, 296 
Brindisi, 29 
British Museum, 86 
Bruyeres, Hugo de, 412 
Bugs, 211 
Bulgarians, 10 
Bull, fresco of, 398 
Byron, Lord, 12, 166-7, 170 
Byzantine architecture and art in 

Greece, 483 sq., 413 

Camels, 246 

Canaris, M., 200 

Canon statute, the, 59 

Canova, 278 

Carrey, J., 90 

Caryatids on Erechtheum, 87, 

Cashel, Rock of, 102 

Cassotis, 243 

Castalian fount, 238, 243 

Castri, 241 

Castriotis, M., 284 

Ceiling pattern at Orchomenus, 

214 
Cella frieze, of Parthenon, 93 sq. j 

the, of Eleusis, 173 
Cerigo, 24 
Chaeronea, 219 sq. 
Chairs, Irish, copied from Greek, 

104 
Chalcidice, the, 421 
Charioteer, bronze, at Delphi, 243 
Charos, 233 

Cheating, at games, 280 
Cheese, used in training, 270 
Chelmos, Mount, 283 
Christ, the Passion of, 72 j in 

Arcadia, 299 



Christian antiquities of Athens 

"3 

Churches, Byzantine, at Athens, 
405 

Cicada (tettix), 334 

Cicero, 2, 174, 265 

Circular buildings, 356 

Cithseron, Mount, 182, 186-7 
191, 204 

Clarke, Dr., 377 

Cleonae, 331 

Cockerell, Mr., 303 

Cocks at Sparta, 365 

Coins, 320 

Colorado, view in, 38 

Comedy, Greek, 114; at Cam- 
bridge, 114 

Comic characters in tragedy, 112 

Constantine, the Emperor, 240 

Convent Libraries, 425 j metals 
and gems, 428 ; embroideries, 
429 ; plaques, 429 

Copais, Company of Lake, 204, 
206-7 

Corfu, 16, 29 

Corinth, 30, 32, 321 sq. 

Corinthian order, 39, 47, 303, 356 

Coronea, 208 

Costume, 209, 222, 230, 311, 361 

Cratinus, 10 

Crete, 25, 26 

Crimea, mounds of, 377, 382 

Curzon, Mr., 414, 428 

Cyclades, 25, 139, 152 

Cyclopean walls, 386-7 

Dalmatia, churches in, 403 
Daphne, pass of, 171 ; church at, 

405-8 
Delphi, 233 sq. 
Delyanni, M., 200 
Depopulation of Greece, 193 
Dexileos, tomb of, 70 
Diomedes, 336 
Dionysus (see Theatre) 
Divri, 285 
Dodwell, quoted, 83, 190, 380, 

385 



INDEX 



435 



Dogs, 36, 250 j on tombs, 217 
Dorians, 364 

Dorian states and their art, 343-6 
Doric order, 39, 41, 88, 253, 303, 

3 l6 > 3 2I "3> 333 
Dorpfeld, Dr., 5, 38, 261, 389, 

397, 399 
Doryphorus, the, 59 

Dramatic competitions, no 

Dress, Greek, 44 

Dukes of Athens, 409 

Eagles, 193 

Earthquakes, 229, 237, 254, 373 

Easter, 297, 314 

Elatea, 219 

Eleusinia, the, 174-8 

Eleusis, 33, 172 sq. 

Eleutherae, 187-90 

Elgin, Lord, 84-5, 377 

Elis, 249 sq. 

Enneacrounos, 38 

Entrances, plan of, in Greek 

palaces, 397-9 
Epaminondas, 32, 201-2, 308, 

369-71 
Epicureans, 121-2 
Epidauros, 352, 353 sq. 
Erechtheum, the, 87 
Eretria, 144 

Ergasteria, mines of, 140 sq. 
Erymanthus, Mount, 249, 283 $ 

river, 285-6, 294 
Euripides, his art, 108-9, ll %> 2 °6 
Eurotas, the, 362 
Events, the, at Olympic games, 

274-6 
Excavations effaced by nature, 6 
Exiles, Roman, 267 
Expression in art, 98 sq. 

Fallmerayer, 339 

Farce, Greek, 10 

Finlay, Mr., 12 

Forts at Phyle, 179 5 Eleutherae, 
188-9 ; Karytena, 306} Staigue, 
in Kerry, a comparison, 333 5 
Tiryns, 331 j Mycenae, 374 



Frankish occupation of Greece, 

I95> 409, 413 
Freeman, Prof., on restorations, 

81 ; criticised, 81, 205 
French tragedy, 112 
Frescoes at Tiryns, 398 
Frieze of Parthenon, 91 j at 

Delphi, 98 j at Tiryns, 399 
Funeral orations, 67 
Furt wangler, Prof., 350 
Fustanella, the, 209 

Games, the Olympic, 264 sq. j 
Isthmian, 327 

Girls, archaic statues of, on 
Acropolis, 65, 101 

Glendalough, chapels in, 403 

Gods, the unknown, 121 

Greece, scenery of, 1 j safety of, 
2, 251 ; progress of, 13 ; faces 
eastward, 16 j routes to, 16, 28- 
30; first aspect of, 18 j de- 
population of, 23, 193 j 
permanence of old race in, 7, 

33 8 "4* 
Greek art, polychromatic, 42-8 j 

notions of death, 68-70 (cf. 

Art) ; travel, 403 
Greek Church, fossil, 430 
Greeks, character of, 7-9, 30, 123 

sq., 296 j courage of, 167 
Gregorovins, Mr., 402, 412 
Grundy, Prof., on topography of 

Plataea, 193 
Guide-books for Greece, 51-2 
Guy de la Roche, 409 

Hadrian's temple of Zeus at 

Athens, 38, 40 
Hagios Petro3, 360 
Haliartus, 208 
Handbooks for Greece, 52 
Helicon, 206 
Helmet of Hiero, 263 
Heraeon, the, at Olympia, 261, 304 
Herculaneum, bronzes of, 45 
Hermes of Vatican, 59 j archaic 

at Athens, 62 ; of Praxiteles, 260 



43^ 



RAMBLES IN GREECE 



Herodotus, 191, 346 

Herondas, 10 

Hesiod, 334 

Hippocrates, 357 

Homer, 68, 234, 330, 334 

Homolle, M., his restoration of 

Delphi, 241 
Honey of Hymettus, 131 ; of 

Laurium, 147 
Hopf, on mediaeval Greece, 339, 

401, 412 
Horses, on Parthenon, 94 
Humour, disappearance of, in 

Greece, 9 
Hydra, the island of, 152, 347-9 

Ictinus, 299, 304 

Iliad, the, 234, 264, 277, 336, 381 

Inns, 297 

Inscriptions, Greek, sporadic pub- 
lication of, 54 

Ionic order, 100 

Ireland, resembles Greece in 
various natural features, and 
in its art, 18, 27, 102, 333, 

379, 382, 3 8 4, 39° 
Isthmian games, 327 
Italy, faces westward, 15 j southern, 

churches in, 403 
Itea, 246-7 

Ithome, Mount, 369 sq. 
Iviron, Monastery, 429 

Jealousy, Greek, 11, 204 
Julian, the Emperor, 240 
Julius Caesar, 319 

Kalamata, 19, 369, 412 
Karytena, 306, 412 
Katakolo, 249, 312 
Kel/s, Book of, 384, 427 
Kephissus, the, near Athens, 132 ; 

in Thriasian plain, 183 j at 

Orchomenus, 214 
Kirrha, 245 

Kladeos, the, 252 sq., 284 
Knidos (Cnidos), treasure-house of, 

at Delphi, 242 



Koron, Gulf of, 19 
Krissa, 244 
Kynaetha, 291 
Kynuria, 358 
Kyparissia, 373 

Ladon, the, 294-5 

Lala, 284 

Lambros, Mr., 426 

Langada Pass, 367 

Laurium, 141-45 its mining Com- 
panies, 145-9 

Lechaeum, 319-21 

Lechouri, village of, 286 

Legends, 233, 335, 391 

Lion of Marathon, 165 ; of Chae- 
ronea, 222 sq. ; restoration of, 
215 ; of the Arsenal, Venice, 
224 

Lionardo da Vinci, 342 

Lion-gate at Mycenae, 385 

Livadia, 208 sq. 

Locrian inscriptions, 216 

Lycabettus, 158 

Lysicrates, monument of, 39, 47, 
126 

Lysippus, 59 

Macedonia, future of, 10 
Maenalus, Mount, 312-13, 316-17 
Maina, 1 1, 20 
Malea, promontory, 24 5 hermit 

of, 24 
Marathon, 1295 plan of battle, 

165-6, 169-70 
Marble, Greek, 42; Pentelican, 1 59 
Mars' Orchestra, 202 
Matapan, Cape, 21 
Mediaeval Greece, 401 sq. 
Medicine in Greece, 297, 357 
Medusa, 342 
Megalopolis, 310-II 
Megaspilion, 414 
Melos, 26 ; Venus of, 26 
Messene, walls and gates of, 371 
Messenia, 369 sq. 
Meteora Monastery, 414 
Metopes, 91 



INDEX 



437 



Michaelis, 89 sq. 

Minyae of Orchomenus, 380 

Mistra, 366, 410 sq. 

Monasteries, Scripou (Orcho- 
menus), 215 j Vourkano, 3705 
Salamis, 413 ; and cf. Athos 

Morea {see Peloponnesus) 

Mount Athos, 415 sq. 

Munychia, 134 

Murray, Mr. A. S., 57, 224, 260, 

3 8 9 

Museums, subdivision of, 49~5 2 ? 

127 ; of Athens, 53 sq., 66 ; of 
Acropolis, 100 j at Olympia, 

Music, 231-25 in Arcadia, 290-1, 

306 
Mycenae, 3, 374 sq. j not known 

to ^Eschylus, 395 
Myron, cow of, 346 
Mysteries, the Eleusinian, 174 sq. 

Naples, museum of, 45 

Natural beauty, exhilarating effect 

of, 212 
Nauplia, 346, 352 
Nero, the Emperor, 217, 327 
New Grange, 380, 382 
Nicias, a slave-owner, 148-50 
Nike" of Paeonius, 255-6, 263 

Oaks, 284, 301 

GEnoe, 186-7 

Old Cathedral, Athens, 404 

Olive-trees, in Attica, 132, 164 

Olonos, Mount, 283, 286-8 

Olympia, 252 sq. 

Olympiads, the, 264 sq. 

Olympic register fabricated by 

Hippias of Elis, 265 
Oracle, Delphic, 235 sq. 
Orchestra, the, 118 
Orchomenus, 213 sq. 
Order, the Doric, 41, 322 5 the 

Ionic, 100 j the Corinthian, 323 
Ornament, Celtic, 393 
Ornamentation of temples, 90-1 
Ostrich egg, at Mycenae, 391 



Othryades, 361 
Owen, Mr., 429-30 

Paeonius, 255-6, 263 

Paestum, temple of, 322 

Pan, 290, 317, 329 

Panagia Phseneromene, Monastery 

of, 405, 41 3 
Panathenaic procession, 93 
Panegyrics, 67 
Pankration, the, 273, 278 
Pantheon at Rome, not an arch, 

379 

Papalexopoulos, Dr., 317, 335 

Parnassus, Mount, 226, 232 

Parnes, Mount, 130 

Parthenion, Mount, 316 

Parthenon, the, 2, 3 j the older 
burnt, 61 ; account of, 78 sq. j 
sketched by Carrey, 90 ; decora- 
tions of, 90, 303 

Passion Week in Greece, 297 

Patras, 30 

Paul, S., at Athens, 119 sq., 319 

Pausanias, quoted, 218, 234, 239, 
255, 256, 258-60, 270, 272, 
302, 309, 334, 379, 380 

Pausanius, King, 240 

Pediments, of Parthenon, 90 sq. j 
of temple at Olympia, 256 sq. 

Peiraeus (Piraeus), 35-6, 133-6,172 

Peloponnesus, the, 18, 247, 320 

Penrose, Mr., 89 

Pentathlon, 266, 274 

Pentelicus, Mount, 128 j quarriet 
of, 159-61 

Perrot, M. G., quoted, 155-7 

Perseids and Pelopids, 396 

Petrachus, the fort of Chaeronea, 
219 

Pctrie, Prof. F., 392-3 

Phaedriades, the, 238 

Phaeneromene, Monastery of, at 
Salamis, 413 

Phalerum, 135 

Phayllus, his leap, 275 

Pheidias {see Phidias). 

Phidias, 92-3, 98, 253 



43» 



RAMBLES IN GREECE 



Phigalia, 299 

Philo, arsenal of, 134 

Phocians, the, 239 

Phocis, 226 sq. 

Phoenicians, in Greece, 24, 142 

Phyle, fort and pass of, 179 

Pickering, Mr., 270 

Pindar, 201, 244, 262 

Pirene, fountain of, 325 

Plataea, 186, 187, 192 

Plato, 105, 117 

Plutarch, quoted, 176, 220, 265 

Politics, modern Greek, 196-200 

Polyandrion, at Chaeronea, 225 

Polybius, 23, 286, 291 

Polychromy, Greek, 42 sq. 

Polycleitus, 59 

Polygnotus, 64 

Polyzalus, dedication of, 242 

Pompeii, statues from, 64 

Praxiteles, 96 ; his Hermes, 260 ; 

his Faun, 291 
Propylaea at Athens, 87 j at 

Eleusis, 172, 173 
Prusias of Bithynia, 24 1 
Psophis, 286 
Psyttalea, 35 
Pullen, Mr., 402 
Pydna, memorial of, 241 
Pylaea, the, 245 
Pyramids, 381 
Pyrgos, 250 
Pyrrhic dance, 231 
Pythian games, 265, 266 

Racine, his estimate of tragedy, 

111-12 
Rain, uncertain as to season, 286 
Renan, quoted, 119, 123 sq., 341 
Rhamnus, 155 

Riley, Mr., 423, 425, 428, 429 
Roads, Greek, 158-9, 184, 213 
Roubillac, 70 
Routes, through Greece, 247, 283, 

288, 312, 320, 347 

Salamis, 171, 174 
Salona, 31 



Salonica, churches in, 405 

Salzburg, compared to Athens, 128 

Sannazaro, Jacopo, 292-3 

Santi Quaranta, 29 

Santorin, 27 

Sayce, Prof., 340 

Schliemann, Dr. H., 6 ; his My- 
cenaean treasure, 127 5 at 
Nauplia, 358 5 excavations at 
Orchomenus, 2145 Mycenae, 

375 *?-, 3 8o > 384 '?•, 3 8 7 *?• 
Schultz, Mr., 402 

Scott, Sir G., 82 

Scott, Sir Walter, 221 

Sculpture, in relation to other arts, 
262, 267 

Sellasia, 362 

Sepulchral monuments in County 
Meath, compared with My- 
cenaean, 382 

Shakespeare, 409 

Shelley, 75 

Shepherd children, 368 

Sicily, 329, 331 

Sicyon (Sikyon), 31 ; art of, 344 

Slavisation of Greece, 339 

Sligo, Marquis of, 377 

Smith, Adam, his theory of sym- 
pathy, 71 

Socrates, 117 

Sophocles, 108 sq. 

Sorrow, its expression in art, 73 

Sparta, 21-2, 362 sq. 

Spartans, 266, 269, 363 

Springs, the, of Delphi, 243 

Squier, Mr., 56 

Stadium, at Delphi, 244 

Stage, the Greek, 108 ; Dorpfeld's 
new theory on, 1 15-17 

Staglieno, the, at Genoa, 70 

Staigue Fort, 333 

Statues, painting of, 45 ; various 
types of, 60 j votive, 262 ; 
archaic, 60-64, 6 5-6 5 at Argos, 
342 j archaistic, 64 

Stele, of Aristion, 63 j of Alxenor. 
216 

Stoics, at Athens, 121 



INDEX 



439 



Stone roofs surviving in Ireland, 

379 
Strabo, 19, 23, 137, 147, 319, 324, 

334 
Sunium, temple of, 139, 150-51 
Swinburne, Mr., his Greek plays, 

"3 

Tactics, old Greek, 169 

Tainaron, promontory of, 21 

Tanagra, figurines of, 55-8 

Taygetus, 22, 365 

Tegea, 315 

Temple of the Winds (Athens), 
47, 126 

Tennyson, his In Memoriatn criti- 
cised, 74 

Tettix, the [see Cicada) 

Theatre of Dionysus at Athens, 
103 sq. ; size of, 105 j at Argos, 
337-8 ; at Epidaurus, 356 

Thebans, character of, 201-2 

Thebes, 194-6, 200 

Theocritus, quoted, 160, 278, 291, 

329 

Theodosius, 240 

Therasia (Thera), prehistoric dis- 
coveries at, 27 

Theseus, temple of, 40, 47 j and 
bull, 62 

Thespiae, 201 

Thucydides, quoted, 172, 215 

Thyreatis, 36Z 

Tiryns, 331 sq. j 397 sq. j destruc- 
tion of, 395, 400 

Tomb of S. Luke, 196 

Tombs, defaced, 47-8 ; the Attic, 
67 sq. ; at Mycenae, 388 sq. 

Tower, the Venetian, at Athens, 
81 

Training, physical, of Greeks, 
268 sq. 

Travel, Greek, on ponies, 4 ; cost 
of, 212 

Treasury of Minyae, 214, 379 } of 
Atreus, 374 sq. 



Trikoupi, M., 5, 163, 197, 199- 

200, 203, 217 
Tripod of Delphi, 240 
Tripolitza, 229, 312, 314 
Tripotamo, 285-6 
Trophonius, oracle of, 210 
Try pi, 366 
Turks, in Greece, 11, 17, 22, 83, 

231 sq. 

Umpires, at Olympia, 279-80 

Vandalism, Greek, 48 
Vegetation, in Arcadia, 300-301 j 

Argoiis, 328, 353, 375 j Kynu- 

ria, 359 ; Laconia, 365, 367 ; 

Messenia, 372-3 
Venetian tower at Athens, 81 
Venetians, bombard the Acropolis, 

80 j destroy sculptures, 87 
Venus, various types of, 97-9 
Vergil, quoted, 277, 291-92 
Vermin, 212 

Villehardouins, the, 366, 40Q-IO 
Viollet-le-Duc, M., 322 
Vlachs, 185 
Vourkano, monastery of, 369, 414 

Waldstein, Dr., his excavations at 
the Argive Heraeum, 343 

Walls, the long, 134, 136 ; Peirzeic, 
215 

"Wedding scene, 230 

Westport, 377 

Wood, Mr. Consul, at Patras, 288 

Wood, use of, in archaic buildings, 
400 

Xenophon, cited, 33, 168 

Zante, 29 

Zea, harbour, 134, 136 

Zeus, temple of, at Athens, 39, 47 j 
temple and statue of, at Olym- 
pia, 252 sq. j bronze figures of 
(Zaj/es), 280 



r T A HE following pages are advertisements of other volumes in 
this Series, and The Macmillan Standard Library. 



The Modern Fiction Library 



A new and important series of some of the best popular novels 
which have been published in recent years. 

These successful books are now made available at a popular price 
in response to the insistent demand for cheaper editions. 

The authors include such well-known names as : 

JACK LONDON JAMES LANE ALLEN 

ROBERT HERRICK WILLIAM STEARNS DAVIS 

H. G. WELLS E. V. LUCAS 

RICHARD WASHBURN CHILD CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS 

ELIZABETH ROBINS Mrs. ROGER A. PRYOR 



Each volume, Cloth, 12mo, 50 cents net; postage, 10 cents extra 



Burning Daylight 

By JACK LONDON 

" Burning Daylight " is just the kind of a story that Jack Lon- 
don loves to write — the story of the struggles of a strong man 
in a world of strong men. Moreover, it is a story which he has 
written purely for the story's sake — he does not preach any- 
thing in it. This fact will make it appeal to those who dislike 
to have their socialism, or whatever it may be, mixed up with 
their fiction. "Jack London," The Springfield Union writes, 
"has outdone himself in l Burning Daylight.' " The book gets 
its title from the hero who is nicknamed " Burning Daylight " 
because it was his custom at the first intimation of daylight to 
rout out his companions for the day's work, so there would be 
no waste of the daylight hours, or in other words, no burning of 
daylight. 

The Reign Of Law A Tale of the Kentucky Hempfields 
By JAMES LANE ALLEN 

" Mr. Allen has a style as original and almost as perfectly fin- 
ished as Hawthorne's, and he has also Hawthorne's fondness for 
spiritual suggestions that make all his stories rich in the quali- 
ties that are lacking in so many novels of the period." — San 
Francisco Chronicle. 

3 



THE MODERN FICTION LIBRARY — Continued 



Kings in Exile 

By CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS 

" ' Kings in Exile,' a book of animal stories by Charles G. D. 
Roberts, is a series of unusually fascinating tales of the sea and 
woods. The author catches the spirit of forest and sea life, and 
the reader comes to have a personal love and knowledge of our 
animal relations." — Boston Globe. 

A Kentucky Cardinal 

By JAMES LANE ALLEN 

" A narrative, told with naive simplicity in the first person, of 
how a man who was devoted to his fruits and flowers and birds 
came to fall in love with a fair neighbor, who treated him at first 
with whimsical raillery and coquetry, and who finally put his 
love to the supreme test." — New York Tribune. 

Elizabeth and her German Garden 

" It is full of nature in many phases — of breeze and sunshine, 
of the glory of the land, and the sheer joy of living. Merry and 
wise, clever and lovable, as polished as it is easy ... a book 
for frequent reading as for wholesome enjoyment." — New York 
Times. 

The Colonel's Story 

By Mrs. ROGER A. PRYOR 

In this novel, Mrs. Pryor, well known and loved for her charm- 
ing reminiscences and books about the old South, has pictured 
life in Virginia sixty or seventy years ago. The story she has 
told is one in which the spirit of the times figures largely ; ad- 
venture and romance have their play and carry the plot to a 
satisfying end. It would be difficult, indeed, if not impossible, 
to find a fitter pen to portray the various features of Virginia 
life and culture than Mrs. Pryor, who is " to the manor born," 
and was raised amid the memories of a past where, until the 
war for Southern independence, families retained their social 
standing and customs from generation to generation. 

4 



THE MODERN FICTION LIBRARY — Continued 



A Friend of Caesar 

By WILLIAM STEARNS DAVIS 

"As a story . . . there can be no question of its success. . . . 
While the beautiful love of Cornelia and Drusus lies at the 
sound, sweet heart of the story, to say so is to give a most 
meagre idea of the large sustained interest of the whole. . . . 
There are many incidents so vivid, so brilliant, that they fix 
themselves in the memory.'" ... — Nancy Huston Banks 
in The Bookman. 

Jim Hands 

By RICHARD WASHBURN CHILD 

"A big, simple, leisurely moving chronicle of life. The one 
who relates it is Jim Hands, an Irish-American, patient, honest, 
shrewd, and as dependable as Gibraltar itself. . . . The 
i heady ' member of Jim's excellent family is the daughter Kath- 
erine, whose love affair with the boss's son, Robert, is tenderly 
and delicately imparted. ... A story study of character in 
many lights and shadows . . . touches of sublime self-sacrifice 
and telling pictures of mutual helpfulness and disinterested 
kindness. ... In its frequent digressions, in its shrewd ob- 
servations of life, in its genuine humor and large outlook reveals 
a personality which commands the profoundest respect and ad- 
miration. Jim is a real man, sound and fine. 1 ' — Daily News. 

A Dark Lantern 

By ELIZABETH ROBINS 

A powerful and striking novel, English in scene, which takes an 
essentially modern view of society and of certain dramatic situ- 
ations. The "Dark Lantern" is a brusque, saturnine, strong- 
willed doctor, who makes wonderful cures, bullies his patients, 
and is hated and sought after. The book has the absorbing 
interest of a strong and moving story, varied in its scenes and 
characters, and sustained throughout on high spiritual, intel- 
lectual, and emotional planes. 

5 



THE MODERN FICTION LIBRARY — Continued 



The Wheels of Chance 

By H. G. WELLS 

" Mr. Wells is beyond question the most plausible romancer of 
the time. . . . He unfolds a breathlessly interesting story of 
battle and adventure, but all the time he is thinking of what our 
vaunted strides in mechanical invention may come to mean. 
. . . Again and again the story, absorbing as it is, brings the 
reader to a reflective pause.'" ... — The New York Tribune. 

The Common Lot 

By ROBERT HERRICK 

A story of present-day life, intensely real in its picture of a 
young architect whose ideals in the beginning were, at their 
highest, aesthetic rather than spiritual. He has been warped 
and twisted by sordid commercial strife until " the spirit of 
greed has eaten him through and through.'" Then comes the 
revelation of himself, — in a disaster due in part to his own 
connivance in "graft," — and his gradual regeneration. The in- 
fluence of his wife's standards on his own and on their family life 
is finely brought out. It is an unusual novel of great interest. 

Mr. Ingleside 

By E. V. LUCAS 

Mr. E. V. Lucas early achieved enviable fame and became well 
known as the clever author of delightful books of travel, and 
charming anthologies of prose and verse. 

When " Over Bemerton's," his first novel, was published, his 
versatility and charm as a writer of fiction stood fully revealed. 
He displayed himself as an intellectual and amusing observer of 
life's foibles with a hero characterized, says the Independent^ by 
"inimitable kindness and humor." 

In "Mr. Ingleside" he has again written a story of high ex- 
cellence, individual and entertaining. With its quiet calm 
reflection, its humorous interpretation of life and its delightful 
situations and scenes it reminds one of the literary excursions 
and charms of the leaders of the early Victorian era. 

6 



The Macmillan Standard Library 

Each volume, Cloth, 12mo, 50 cents 



This series has taken its place as one of the most important popular- 
priced editions. The " Library " includes only those books which have 
been put to the test of public opinion and have not been found wanting, 
books, in other words, which have come to be regarded as standards in the 
fields of knowledge — literature, religion, biography, history, politics, art, 
economics, sports, sociology, and belles lettres. Together they make the 
most complete and authoritative works on the several subjects. 



Notable Additions to the Macmillan Standard Library 



Bailey, L. H. 

THE COUNTRY LIFE MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 
"... clearly thought out, admirably written, and always stimulating in 
its generalization and in the perspectives it opens." — Philadelphia Press. 
" Concise and straightforward to the point of bareness in its presentation 
of facts, arguments, and plans, its every sentence is packed so full of what 
the author thinks, knows, and hopes of the condition, prospects, and possi- 
bilities of rural life, that the volume comes as near to being solid meat as 
any book can come." — New York Times. 

Conyngton, Mary 

HOW TO HELP: A MANUAL OF PRACTICAL CHARITY 

" It is an exceedingly comprehensive work, and its chapters on the home- 
less man and woman, its care of needy families, and the discussion of the 
problems of child labor will prove of value to the philanthropic worker." 

HOW TO GROW VEGETABLES 

" It is particularly valuable to a beginner in vegetable gardening, giving 
not only a convenient and reliable planting-table, but giving particular 
attention to the culture of the vegetables." — Suburban Life. 

Hapgood, Norman 

LINCOLN, ABRAHAM, THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE 

"A life of Lincoln that has never been surpassed in vividness, compact- 
ness, and lifelike reality." — Chicago Tribune. 

" Mr. Hapgood is not depicting a mere model here, but a living, awk- 
ward, fallible, steadfast, noble man." — Boston Globe. 

7 



THE MACMILLAN STANDARD LIBRARY — Continued 



Hearn, Lafcadio 

JAPAN: AN ATTEMPT AT INTERPRETATION 

" A thousand books have been written about Japan, but this one is 
one of the rarely precious volumes which opens the door to an intimate 
acquaintance with the wonderful people who command the attention of 
the world to-day." — Boston Herald. 

Lyon, D. Everett 

HOW TO KEEP BEES FOR PROFIT 

" A book which gives an insight into the life history of the bee family, 
pointing out the various methods by which bee-keeping may be made of 
increased interest and profit, as well as telling the novice how to start an 
apiary and care for it." — Country Life in America. 

McLennan, John 

A MANUAL OF PRACTICAL FARMING 

" No better adjective can be used in describing this book than the one 
included in the title " practical," for the author has placed before the 
reader in the simplest terms a means of assistance in the ordinary problems 
of farming." — National Ntirseryman. 

Mathews, Shailer 

THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER 

"The book throughout is characterized by good sense and restraint. 
. o . A notable book and one that every Christian may read with profit." 
— The Living Church. 

St. Maur, Kate V. 

A SELF-SUPPORTING HOME 

" Each chapter is the detailed account of all the work necessary for one 
month — in the vegetable garden, among the small fruits, with the fowls, 
guineas, rabbits, caries, and in every branch of husbandry to be met with 
on the small farm. — Louisville Courier- Journal. 

Valentine, C. S. 

HOW TO KEEP HENS FOR PROFIT 

"Those who have been looking for the reason why their poultry ven- 
tures were not yielding a fair profit, those who are just starting in the 
poultry business, and seasoned poultrymen will all find in it much of 
value." — Chicago Tribune. 

8 



Other Volumes in the Macmillan Standard Library 



Addams, Jane 

THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND THE CITY STREETS 

" Shows such sanity, such breadth and tolerance of mind, and such pene- 
tration into the inner meanings of outward phenomena as to make it a 
book which no one can afford to miss. — New York Times. 

Campbell, R. J. 

THE NEW THEOLOGY 

" A fine contribution to the better thought of our times and written in 
the spirit of the Master." — St. Paul Dispatch. 

Clark, T. M. 

THE CARE OF A HOUSE 

" If the average man knew one-tenth of what Mr. Clark tells him in 
this book, he would be able to save money every year on repairs, etc." — 
Chicago Tribune. 

Coolidge, Archibald Cary 

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER 

"Justly entitled to recognition as a work of real distinction ... it 
moves the reader to thought." — Nation. 

Croly, Herbert 

THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE 

"The most profound and illuminating study of our national conditions 
which has appeared in many years. — Theodore Roosevelt. 

Ely, Richard T. 

MONOPOLIES AND TRUSTS 

" The evils of monopoly are plainly stated and remedies are proposed. 
This book should be a help to every man in active business life." — Balti- 
more Sun. 

Haultain, Arnold 

THE MYSTERY OF GOLF 

"It is more than a golf book. There is interwoven with it a play of 
mild philosophy and of pointed wit." — Boston Globe. 

9 



THE MACMILLAN STANDARD LIBRARY — Continued 



Hillquit, Morris 

SOCIALISM IN THEORY AND PRACTICE 

" An interesting historical sketch of the movement." — Newark Evening 

News. 

Home, C. Silvester 

DAVID LIVINGSTONE 

The centenary edition of this popular work. A clear, simple, narrative 
biography of the great missionary, explorer, and scientist. 

Hunter, Robert 

POVERTY 

" Mr. Hunter's book is at once sympathetic and scientific. He brings 
to the task a store of practical experience in settlement work gathered in 
many parts of the country." — Boston Transcript. 

SOCIALISTS AT WORK 

" A vivid, running characterization of the foremost personalities in the 
Socialist movement throughout the world." — Review of Reviews. 

King, Henry Churchill 

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 

" I know no other study of the ethical teaching of Jesus so scholarly, 
careful, clear, and compact as this." — G. H. Palmer, Uarvard Univer- 
sity. 

• RATIONAL LIVING 

" An able conspectus of modern psychological investigation, viewed from 
the Christian standpoint." — Philadelphia Public Ledger. 

London, Jack 

REVOLUTION, AND OTHER ESSAYS 

THE WAR OF THE CLASSES 

" Mr. London's book is thoroughly interesting, and his point of view is 
very different from that of the closet theorist. " — Springfield Repub' 
lican. 

10 



